OLED Smartphones - introduction and industry news - Page 48

IHS estimates that flexible OLED production capacity is set to increase from 1.5 million square meters to 20.1 million square meters between 2016 and 2020. That's a compound annual growth rate of 91%!

IHS says that almost all new small-sized displays OLED capacity added in the future will be used to produce flexible OLEDs, which will grow the market share of flexible OLEDs for mobile applications from 28% today to 80% by 2020. In the years between 2016 to 2020, OLED producers in China, Korea and Japan will build the equivalent of 46 new flexible AMOLED fabs (each with 30,000 monthly substrates).

According to the Korea Herald, Samsung decided to "play it safe" with its next year's flagship phone and it will adopt the same basic design as in its current Galaxy S8. The 2018 Galaxy S9 will use a 5.8" Infinity curved Super AMOLED display (and the S9+ will use a 6.2" display as used in the S8+).

It is likely that even if this report is true, Samsung Display will use an enhanced display. Even though the display used in the GS8 was "the best mobile display ever" according to DisplayMate - there is still room for improvement, for example higher resolution (good for VR), better efficiency or a larger color gamut.

According to Taiwan's Digitimes, LG Display is facing delays in flexible OLED production at its $900 million E5 line in Gumi that should have started producing panels last month, but now it is expected to start mass production in August.

In April 2017 it was reported that LG Display has secured a 5.5" flexible OLED supply deal to China-based Xiaomi, for the company's next-gen flagship phone. According to Digitimes, however, LGD now lost this supply deal and Xiaomi has ordered over 3 million flexible OLEDs (6" QHD ones) from Samsung, who will supply the displays in December 2017 and January 2018. Xiaomi will have to delay the launch of its flagship phone to early 2018.

AndroidPolice blog claims it has exclusive information regarding Google's upcoming flagship smartphone, the 2017 Pixel XL. Besides the leaked image you see below, the blog claims that the Pixel XL will use a 6" flexible OLED display (2:1 aspect ratio) - produced by LG Display.

The OLED display will have (according to the leaked image) curved corners - but it will not sport an edge-folded design.

The Korea Herald reports that Apple is in talks with LG Display to invest 2-3 trillion Won ($1.7-$2.6 billion USD) in LG's OLED production lines, in order to exclusively reserve some of LG's flexible OLED capacity.

The report says that the two firms already agreed on these investment plans, but the details (which includes the investment size and timing) have not been finalized yet. A couple of month ago we heard reports (originating from another Korean news outlet, Business Korea) that LGD is in talks with Apple.

Digitimes reports that Apple will only be able to ship a very limited number of OLED iPhones following the expected launch in September, as SDC's capacity will be limited to about 3-4 million flexible OLED displays.

Apple goal is to ship 50-60 million OLED iPhones in 2017, and have signed a supply agreement with SDC to supply these displays (some estimate that SDC promised to ship 80 million OLEDs in 2017 alone). But SDC still struggles with low yields for these specific OLED displays and will not be able to produce so many displays in time.

ETNews reports that Samsung Display is expected to initiate flexible OLED production for Apple's first OLED iPhone later this month. Apple recently approved the prototype panels, and Samsung is getting ready to increase its production rate.

SDC will ship over 10 million flexible OLEDs to Apple every month, as Apple ordered over 80 million OLEDs for 2017 alone. According to ETNews, Apple will not bend the flexible OLED - the iPhone's display will be flat.

Samsung's latest flagship phones, the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ are apparently selling very well - Samsung revealed that it sold more than one million S8 in South Korea, only 37 days after the official launch - it took the Galaxy S7 74 days to achieve the same feat.

Samsung further says that global shipments exceeded 10 million units already.

LG Display's 900 million E5 line in Gumi is scheduled to start producing flexible AMOLED soon, and according to the Korea Herald LG aims to adopt flexible OLEDs in its upcoming V30 smartphone (due out in September) and also in the 2018 G7 phone.

The Korea Herald says that LG aims to start adopting OLEDs in all its future smartphones - although it is likely that the Korean maker will only use OLEDs in premium phones (especially as it is only producing high-end flexible OLEDs rather than glass based ones). LGD will also reportedly devote some of its capacity to Chinese phone makers.

Image retention ("Burn in") is one of the major drawbacks of OLED displays, and a static icon or very consistent displays are always a problem with such displays. When Samsung introduced the Galaxy S8 it implemented a soft home button, which caused some concerns.

PhoneArena confirm that Samsung's home button actually moves around by a few pixels from time to time - obviously to prevent serious image retention. Samsung employed the same trick with its "always on" clock display in previous OLED phones. This is a good way to improve image retention - although it won't solve the problem completely as the icon only moves around by a few pixels each time.