OLED Smartphones - introduction and industry news - Page 67

Semiconductor Energy Laboratory, in collaboration with Nokia developed a new foldable OLED display. The companies are demonstrating two display prototypes. Both displays are 5.9" in size with a 1280x720 (249 PPI) resolution. One of them can be folded in two (like a book) and the other can be folded in three (seen in the video below).

Those flexible OLED displays use a white OLEDs with color filters (WOLED-CF) design. To produce the display, SEL deposited the organic and color filters layers on a glass substrate, which is later peeled off and replaced with a flexible substrate. The displays can be bent up up to a curvature of 2 mm (two-folds) or 4 mm (three folds). SEL says that these displays can be bent more than 100,000 times.

Last week Engadget reported that samsung is developing a new virtual reality headset, which will be similar to Oculus VR's headset - and will also sport an AMOLED display. Today Engadget reports that Samsung's headset is actually developed in collaboration with Oculus VR.

In this collaboration Oculus provides the software while Samsung provides the hardware. As part of the collaboration, Samsung gives Oculus early-access to its next-gen high-resolution (larger than Full-HD) OLED displays.

Peter Misek, an analyst at Jefferies, just returned from a trip to Asia, and he came back with some pretty wild Apple rumors. Peter claims that there are several Apple prototypes "floating around" - including an iPhone with a 5.5" 2K OLED display, a foldable iPhone with a 4" OLED (that opens into an iPad mini) and of course smart watches and wearable devices.

It seems highly unlikely that Apple will adopt an OLED display in its next iPhone. Apple does not like to rely on a single supplier as currently only SDC can produce AMOLED in any meaningful volume. And even SDC does not have the required volume to supply Apple. The foldable iPhone is even less likely and is probably just speculation (or, as Peter himself says, this may just be Apple trying to confuse its competitors).

Knockr is a new (and free) Android application that enables lock-screen gestures. The idea is that you can setup your phone so that a certain gesture opens a specific application. Knockr only works on devices with OLED screens - because it actually does not turns-off the display on the lock screen, it simply turns it black. On an LCD display, there will be a significant battery drain...

As more and more phones adopt OLED displays, we can expect software to take advantage of the OLED features. In the past few weeks we've seen two interesting patents (here and here) that detail innovative ways to save power on OLED displays.

AU Optronics reported their financial results for Q1 2014 - declining sales due to the traditional slow season, higher revenue and a net profit of 166 million TWD ($5.5 million). Regarding OLEDs, the company updated that it is sampling mobile phone panels and have provided samples to Chinese phones makers.

Even though it was reported that AUO OLED mass production back in October 2013, they are still not actually producing any panels. They now aim to start production in Q2 or Q3 2014, and in any case the capacity is "not so huge".

When Samsung first released the GS5, we thought the 5.1" FHD Super AMOLED display is pretty similar to the 4.99" FHD one used in the GS4. But DisplayMate found out that this is a much superior display in many aspects, one of them being that it is 27% more efficient.

GS5 subpixels

GS4 subpixels

Samsung told DisplayMate that the improvement mostly came from more efficient OLED materials. They also incorporated new display electronics and optics and that helped as well. But now Chipworks posted a teardown of the GS5, and they published a macro image of the display's sub pixels. It turns out that it's a different architecture than the GS4, and this may explains some of the performance boost, too.

According to IHS, Samsung's Galaxy S5 costs about $256 to make, and the most expensive component is the 5.1" FHD Super AMOLED display which costs $63. That's actually cheaper than the 4.99" display on the GS4 which was estimated at $75 back in 2013 by IHS. In 2013, DisplaySearch estimated the GS4 display at just over $60.

According to reports from Korea towards the end of 2013, Samsung Electronics indeed asked Samsung Display to reduce its AMOLED prices in an effort to reduce smartphone costs (even though IHS esimates that the GS5 costs about $20 more than the GS4, even with the cheaper display). Then again it may simply be that DisplaySearch were correct and the $60 price remained the same even though the new display is a bit larger and performs a lot better.

Samsung launched the GS5 last week, and it seems that the company's new flagship phone is off to a good start. Yoon Han-kil, senior vice president of Samsung's product strategy team says that the new phone is selling faster than the GS4, and they said that while the GS4 sold 10 million units in 27 days, the GS5 will do "significantly better". The first-day GS5 sales in the US were up 30% compared to the GS4.

The GS5 uses a 5.1" FHD (432 PPI, Diamond Pixel) Super AMOLED display which at first seemed quite similar to the 5" FHD display on the GS4, but according to DisplayMate, the display is far superior in many aspects, and it's actually the best mobile display ever.

Today Samsung is launching the Galaxy S5 worldwide. In the US, both AT&T and Sprint offer it for $189 (with a plan) or $699 unlocked. The GS5 features a 5.1" FHD (432 PPI, Diamond Pixel ) Super AMOLED display, a 2.5 Ghz quad-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 16MP camera (4K video support). The GS5 is dust and water resistant, and it packs a finger scanner and a heart rate sensor.

The 5.1" Super AMOLED display was tested by DisplayMate, who found it to be the best mobile display on the market - outperforming all other OLED and LCD displays as it features the highest brightness, the lowest reflectance, the highest color accuracy, the highest contrast rating in ambient light and the smallest brightness variation with viewing angle.

It's highly likely that Samsung will soon release a Galaxy S5 mini device (after all, there was a GS4 mini and GS3 mini). According to SamMobile, the GS5 mini will sport a 4.5" 720p Super AMOLED display. Other features include a 8mp camera, 1.5Gb of RAM, 16GB storage and Android 4.4 Kitkat.

SamMobile says that their insider did not reveal the launch date, but previous leaks say Samsung will release the GS5 mini (with a model number SM-G800) in June.