OLED Smartphones - introduction and industry news - Page 30

Back in early 2017 it was reported that Apple is in discussions with BOE Display to supply OLED displays for future iPhones. Up until now Samsung was the exclusive iPhone AMOLED supplier, but a new report from Japan suggests that BOE and Apple's talks are still ongoing.

In fact the Nikkei Asian Review says that Apple is "aggressively testing" BOE's flexible AMOLED displays. The NAR claims that Apple will decide whether to add BOE as a supplier by the end of 2019. Such a deal will be a great step forward for BOE toward its goal to become a leading AMOLED supplier.

DisplayMate tested Samsung's latest OLED flagship phone, the Galaxy Note 10+, and (as expected) says that this is the world's best smartphone display. DisplayMate says that the Note 10+ sets 13 new display performance records - including the world's highest absolute color accuracy and highest peak brightness (at 1,308 nits).

Other records set by the Note 10+ Dynamic AMOLED include the best image contrast accuracy, the smallest shift in color accuracy with image content, the largest native color gamut (113% DCI-P3 and 142% sRGB / Rec.709) and the lowest screen reflectance.

OLED driver IC developer MagnaChip reported its financial results for Q2 2019, with revenues that exceeded its own guidance. One of the company's main growth drivers is OLED display driver ICs, which were up 7% from Q2 2018 to $73 million, the company's highest quarter ever.

Magnachip says that its OLED business benefited from six new OLED smartphone that were launched in Asia during the quarter, and the company also secured four new design wins. Most of its OLED driver revenues are from its 40-nm display driver, but its new 28-nm driver has entered mass production and will be a key revenue driver going forward.

Business Korea reports that Sharp will withdraw from the smartphone OLED market. Sharp started producing OLEDs in low volume in August 2018, and Business Korea quotes IHS saying that Sharp understands it cannot compete with Korean and Chinese companies with both technology and price.

Business Korea says that Sharp produced a total of 60,000 smartphone OLED panels - 6.2" 1440x2992 flexible notch-type AMOLEDs that were adopted in Sharp's own Aquos Zero phone. Sharp has already stopped production last month. It is not clear if Sharp will still continue to produce OLEDs for other applications (automotive perhaps?) or will it withdraw from all production.

In April 2019, after early reviewers reported that that the foldable screen in their Galaxy Fold devices broke down after a day or so, Samsung decided to delay the release of its foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Fold.

Following three months of re-design, Samsung now announced that it fixed all the issues in its foldable smartphone and is ready to start shipping in September 2019. Here are the list of changes that Samsung announced, including both design and construction improvements:

In January 2019 Xiaomi unveiled a new prototype smartphone that uses a tri-foldable OLED display. The company did not disclose much information, but a report from Taiwan suggested that the OLED supplier for this prototype was Visionox.

In an interview with China Daily a Visionox VP confirms that Visionox supplied the foldable OLED prototypes to Visionox. He also says that Visionox supplied Xiaomi with the innovative OLED displays with under-the-screen camera (seen in the video below).

According to a new report from Korea, LG Electronics is in talks with China-based BOE to supply OLED panels for future smartphones -and replace LGE's current supplier - it's sister company LG Display.

The report suggests two reasons for LG's talk with BOE. First is LG's drive to cut costs as its mobile phone business is losing massive amounts of money. The second reason is that LG Display cannot supply enough panels for LG Electronics as it still struggles with low production yields.

Bloomberg reports that Samsung Electronics completed its two-month Galaxy Fold redesign which fixed the problems that caused the foldable OLED to fail. Samsung will be able to resume production soon, but the company cannot yet commit to a new shipping date.

Samsung had to re-engineer the Galaxy Fold hinge, to help protect the OLED display, and it also stretched the protective film to wrap around the entire scree which makes it impossible to remove it (which some reviewers mistakenly did).

DSCC published an interesting note, detailing the world's top 10 devices by flexible AMOLED sales in the first half of 2019. The list contains only three vendors: Samsung, Apple and Huawei.

Total flexible AMOLED revenues for these ten devices are almost $4.7 billion, and Samsung phones account for 53% ($2.5 billion). Apple has only 2 leading models, but accounts for 30% of the revenues ($1.4 billion) and Huawei phones generated $723 million in flexible AMOLED revenues.

LG Electronics announced that its latest smartphone, the V50 ThinQ 5G is off to a great start, having sold 100,000 units in Korea in the first week following its launch. LGE says that this is more than four times than the sales of its V40 smartphone.

The V50 ThinQ 5G sports a 6.4" 1440x3120 pOLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage and a microSD slot. LG's first 5G smartphone also offers a triple camera setup.