Engadget has posted an interesting post about the HTC Desire SLCD and AMOLED displays. While the AMOLED is more vibrant and bright, the S-LCD shows a sharper image (this is due to the AMOLED's PenTile pixel matrix that uses two subpixels per pixel instead of three). They also claim that the SLCD offers a better contrast - even though the AMOLED's blacks are much blacker. This is again due to the PenTile arrangement.

In the sunlight visibility test, the AMOLED actually comes on top, but both are hardly readable. HTC's glossy glass is to blame for this, really. In terms of power efficiency, Engadget say that the AMOLED comes on top - after 5 hours of showing movies, the LCD-Desire ran out of power while the AMOLED one had 30% power left (HTC and Samsung say otherwise, by the way). Here's a video comparing both phones:

Back in February, Pioneer and Mitsubishi Chemical has announced an OLED Lighting JV. Pioneer will produce OLED lighting panels, Mitsubishi Chemical will supply chemicals and will market and sell the panels through their Verbatim daughter company.

We had the good chance to speak with Verbatim regarding this new OLED business.

Q: Are there any updates on the OLED JV?
Mitsubishi Chemical Corp will start to supply samples at the end of 2010, and mass production in the middle of 2011.

Mitsubishi Electric says that they will start selling the Diamond Vision OLED displays in 100" and above sizes on September 21st. The Diamond Vision (announced back in October 2009) is a modular displays for indoor use. Each module is 384mx384mm, with 128x128 resolution. Each pixel is about 3mm in size, you need to view the displays from at least two meters away.

155-inch Diamond-Vision prototype

The Diamond Vision is bright (1,200cd/m²) and has a good contrast (twice as better as LED, says Mitsubishi) - so it can be used in brightly-lit areas such as airports or stations. The OLEDs were jointly developed by Mitsubishi and Pioneer.

Shin Jong-Khun, Samsung's telecom unit CEO says that Samsung plans to expand the Galaxy Tab lineup with two new models - a 6" and a 10" one, both with AMOLED displays. A few days ago we reported that Digitimes estimates AMOLED tabs in 2011, too.

Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab

After all, Samsung will have to do something with that expanded AMOLED production capacity in 2011...

TAT (a Swedish software technology and design company) has produced a beautiful video showing the future of screen technology: flexible, stretchable displays, transparent screens, augmented UI and more. They do not mention OLEDs directly, but obviously these can fit right in. I'm not sure whether we'll be able to cope with so much information all the time...

Sim4tec has released a new version (v3.0) of their OLED simulation software, SimOLED. New features include a new user interface, faster calculation speed, line plots and contour plots, electronic, excitonic and optic module seamlessly combined and new results (current, power, and quantum efficiencies, CIE diagram and more)

The new combination of the electronic module with the excitonic and optic modules allows users to simulate voltage-dependent optical quantities like the color maintenance of white OLEDs.

Update: This is not an AMOLED, but an LCD. Thanks for all the readers who commented!

Samsung has developed a touch-enabled transparent AMOLEDs, and has a very nice demo showing it off. Sadly we do not have any technical details about this display, or when Samsung expects to commercialize it...

Back in February, we learned that Samsung is strongly into transparent AMOLEDs, and want to introduce several new products that use this technology. Here's another great use of transparent OLEDs in a wine point-of-sale or museum or information center.

Samsung announced that China's top three carriers (China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom) will soon offer the Galaxy S phone. Each will sell its own variant (different networks, and the China Mobile version will offer CMMB mobile TV support).

Samsung Galaxy S

The Galaxy S offers a large 4" Super-AMOLED display, 1Ghz processor and 720p HD video recording.

There are reports that HTC is planning to launch a new Windows Phone 7 phone next week (in Australia, for some reason). The HD3 will have a 4.5" AMOLED display (1200x800). It will also feature a 1.5Ghz dual-core CPU, 1GB of ram, 32GB of flash memory, Wi-Fi and 4G network support.

The AMOLED display sounds too good (and too big) to be true, especially since HTC has already switched to S-LCDs in several phones. On the other hand, we do know that Microsoft expects most WP7 devices to use OLED displays. We'll have to wait till September 15th to learn if this is for real.

Digitimes estimates that Samsung will release a new Galaxy Tab model with an AMOLED display sometimes in 2011. As you remember, the Galaxy Tab announced a few days ago uses a TFT-LCD display.

Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab