Universal Display and Samsung announced another extension (till March 31, 2011) to their license agreement (that was announced back in 2005). Samsung will continue to use UDC's PHOLED materials (red, and soon green) in their AMOLED products.

The original agreement expired a while back and it seems that the two companies aren't able to negotiate a new agreement yet - so they keep extending the existing agreement (that's the third three month extension already).

LG announced that they will increase their total investment in 2011 by 12% - to 21 billion won (over $18.8 billion). About 70% of this investment will go for LG Electronics and LG Display, which will continue work on AMOLEDs, 3D displays and e-paper.

Last month we reported that LG's AMOLED investment in the next 5 years might reach $7 billion, and will include 4.5-Gen lines, 5.5-Gen lines and larger ones later on.

Update: LG has officially announced the Optimus Black, and the display is called NOVA. More information here!

LG is teasing us with a new Android phone, codenamed 'B', that they promise to preview at CES 2011 next month. The most striking feature of this new phone is a super-bright display - that offers 700 nits of brightness, which is 40% more than the Super-AMOLED on the Galaxy S. You can see it side-by-side with the iPhone 4 and the Galaxy S:

We don't know whether that's a new kind of LCD or an AMOLED yet... we'll have to wait till CES.

Winstar has released a series of new PMOLED displays which include character displays (8x2, 12x2, 20x4) and graphic displays (50x16, 76x16, 100x32). These have the same size and pin-outs like Winstar existing LCD displays, so you can easily change from LCD to OLEDs.

Winstar provides these displays with or without polarizer (with polarizer they achieve a contrast ratio of 2000:1).

A few days ago we reported that Toshiba Mobile Display plans to invest around $1.2 billion in a new LCD factory that will make small-sized LTPS LCD displays, and Apple will be the client (and will also invest in the new plant). Today we hear pretty much the same story about Sharp - another $1.2 billion LCD plant, and Apple is the client and investor again.

The new plant is actually an expansion of Sharp's existing factory in kameyama. And the Apple bit isn't official yet (the same as was the Toshiba story - which actually denied the fact any connection to Apple).

Today we have moved OLED-Info to a new and more powerful server. This will hopefully make the site faster and more stable. The new server is hosted and managed by LiquidWeb.

If you experience any weird issues or errors - please report them so we can get them fixed quickly. Hopefully the migration will be hassle free, but these things seldom are...

Researchers from UCLA developed a new transparent electrode based on silver nanowires (AgNW) that is a replacement for ITO. The new electrode is made from low-cost and non-toxic materials and is easy to fabricate. It also offers high transparency, low sheet resistance and low surface roughness.

The new electrode is produced on a cross-linked, transparent polyacylate substrate, which is cheaper than glass and can be stiff and rigid or flexible and stretchable. The researchers say that the new electrode could be used to create a shape-memory polymer substrate that can be deformed to various stable shapes - and the deformation is reversible, causes minimal damage to the devices so it can be repeated many times.

The Venue (previously Thunder) which is similar to the Venue-Pro (but with Android 2.2 and not WP7) is said to be launching this month in Korea 700,000 won (around $610). The Venue (which was announced back in April 2010) has a 4.1" touch AMOLED display and a curved Gorilla Glass (perhaps similar to the Nexus-S glass). It's got a "heavily customized" Dell "Stage" UI, ties with Facebook and Twitter, has an integrated Hulu application and supports Flash 10.1.

Philips announced a new three-year project called EMO (Emerging Market OLED) - to research, develop and eventually produce OLED lighting panels targeting emerging markets in Brazil. Philips will collaborate with the CERTI Foundation (Reference Center in Innovative Technologies) in this project.

We don't have any technical details about this project yet (such as research goals and panel specification goals), or when do they hope to start production.

Nokia's E7 was supposed to start shipping on December 10th, but now it is delayed till 'early 2011'. The E7 is a QWERTY slider running Symbian^3 and has a 4" Clear-Black AMOLED (640x360) display.