OLED Smartphones - introduction and industry news - Page 77

Verizon is now accepting pre-orders for the Blackberry Q10, with its square 3.2" 720x720 (330 ppi) Super AMOLED display. The Q10 costs $200 with a two-year contract, or $600 unlocked. Verizon will ship this phone on June 6.

Other Q10 features include a hardware keyboard, LTE, 1.5Ghz dual-core CPU and 2GB of RAM. This is Blackberry's first hardware keyboard device to sport the company's new BB10 OS.

Back in 2010 Samsung said it cannot meet customer demand in its AMOLED fab. As a result, HTC couldn't produce some phones and had to switch from OLED to LCD in some models. Now HTC says that this was a strategical decision by Samsung which is "using their component supply as a competitive weapon".

HTC Desire

In the meantime Samsung's AMOLED capacity has grown dramatically, and since then HTC returned to AMOLED displays on some phones models. HTC is still buying OLEDS from Samsung, but we know it wants to change a supplier.

We heard speculation about Motorola's upcoming "X" phone for a while now. Today Motorola's CEO Dennis Woodside confirmed that the company is developing a new flagship phone that will be called "Moto X". The Moto X will sport an OLED display and advanced sensors. Motorola wants to launch it in October 2013, and this will be the first phone designed after Google bough Motorola.

One of the key features of this new phone will be the low power consumption. It will include two processors, and I assume that it will use a Super AMOLED Advanced display - which use red and reen phosphorescent emitters to cut the power consumption by 25% compared to normal Super AMOLED displays (except for the one used in the GS4). Motorola already uses these panels (or regular Super AMOLED ones) in several of their mobile phones, including the relatively new RAZR i, RAZR HD and RAZR M.

Samsung's flagship Galaxy S4 phone uses a new OLED panel which adopts a green PHOLED emitter - which cuts the power consumption by about 25%. During the latest SID conference, Samsung demonstrated this very nicely:

Last week Samsung reported that they will soon reach 10 million Galaxy S4 sales, and yesterday (May 23) they announced that indeed they surpassed that number. It took samsung less than a month to do so. The company hopes to sell over 100 million GS4 units - or double the GS3 sales. The GS4 is currently available in more than 110 countries and will be rolled out to a total of 155 countries soon.

The GS4 features a 4.99" Full-HD (1920x1280, 441 PPI) Super AMOLED display, an Octacore 1.6Ghz Exynos CPU (some models use a Quadcore 1.9 Ghz Qualcomm CPU), 2GB of memory, 13 mp camera and a 2,600mAh battery - all this while being a smaller and lighter than the GS3. The GS4 includes a lot of new software features and special UI controls, include the Adapt Display which allows extensive display calibration adjustments.

Samsung has high hopes for the Galaxy S4 (they actually hope to sell over 100 million units - or double the GS3 sales). Today the company reported that they will soon reach 10 million units sold - less than a month after launching the phone (update: on May 23 Samsung announced that indeed they reached the 10 million sales mark).

The GS3 took 50 days to reach 10 million in sales, so the GS4 is selling at a much faster rate (almost double the rate actually). Google just announced that they will offer a GS4 model with stock Android 4.2 on their Google Play on June 26 for $649, this won't hurt sales rate I guess.

Universal Display reported their financial results for Q1 2013. Revenues were $15 million (up 19% compared to Q1 2012) - with a 40% increase in commercial material sales, mostly due to the fact that Samsung Display Corporation (SDC) adopted UDC's green PHOLED (host and emitter) in the 5" Full-HD Super AMOLED dipslay used in the GS4 smartphone (shipments of these new materials started in March). UDC reported a net loss of $4.8 million in the quarter.

Guidance and cash

UDC did not change their revenue guidance for 2013 - it will be in the range of $110 - $125 million (32% to 50% increase over 2012). This includes a $40 million license free from SDC. They assume that the OLED market will grow to over $10 billion in 2013 (they use DisplaySearch estimates). UDC has around $220 million in cash and they used $10.9 million in the first quarter.

Samsung says that orders for the Galaxy S4 so far has been "explosive". In fact the company didn't anticipate such strong orders and cannot meet demand (they have a shortage of memory chips, apparently). Samsung have high hopes for the S4, and they hope to sell over 100 million units - that's double compared to the S3 (which sold 50 million units so far).

In fact all the phones in the Galaxy S series together just recently crossed the 100 million units mark. In January 2013 Samsung announced that the GS2 sold 40 million units, the GS3 sold 30 million and GS1 sold almost 30 million.

DisplayMate, the experts on display optimization, testing and evaluation, posted a new article comparing the GS4 display (4.99" Full-HD, 441 PPI) to the iPhone 5's LCD and the GS3. The GS4's Super AMOLED is a "very impressive display", and DisplayMate says that OLEDs have now reached the stage when they challenge the best LCD displays. There are advantages and disadvantages to both technologies, but we have to keep in mind that OLEDs are advancing at a much more rapid rate compared to LCDs which is now a mature technology.

Samsung Galaxy S4

Compared to the S3, the S4 is brighter by 25% (and when using Automatic Brightness, it's 68% brighter as this setting allows the brightness to reach a high level unreachable in manual brightness mode), it's 20% more power efficient (due to the green PHOLED materials) and it's got 44% more pixels per inch (and more than double the total number of pixels).

Yoon Bu-hyun, LG Electronics's mobile business VP said that LG plans to launch a mobile phone that has an unbreakable flexible OLED display in Q4 2013. LG Display started working on these flexible OLEDs in late 2011 and they consider those displays to have a real value for the mobile solution (as opposed to glass based OLEDs which LG considers inferior to LCDs for mobile applications).

LG/UDC flexible OLED panel prototype

The last time we heard from LG Display regarding their flexible OLED was in January 2013. Back then the company said it was on track to start mass production of plastic based flexible OLEDs in H2 2013. The capacity will be "very limited" and they expect to be able to support just one or two customers. LG Display's flexible OLEDs will use polyimide coated substrate and direct-emission RGB sub-pixels (as opposed to LG's OLED TV which use white OLEDs with color filters).