Blackbody is showing some interesting new OLED lighting designs including a flexible red OLED stripe inside what seems to be a glass, an OLED dress and an OLED chandelier:
During Samsung Electronic's conference call, the company said they will not release an AMOLED tablet in 2011. Samsung already unveiled 7" Super AMOLED prototypes in November 2010 and we had hopes they'll begin making those displays soon. It seems we'll have to wait till 2012 for an AMOLED tablet...
Samsung's Galaxy II started selling in Europe a couple of day ago (and it's got raving reviews) - and it now appears in Amazon.com too - unlocked for $899 (the 16GB version). It will probably start shipping cheaper soon (with carrier contracts) - but if you must have the best Smartphone on the market, you can buy it now.
Samsung's Galaxy S II (or S2) is the successor to the popular Galaxy S. It has a 4.3" WVGA Super AMOLED plus display, 1.2Ghz dual-core processor, NFC, Bluetooth 3 and HSPA+. It's only 8.49mm thick at its thinnest point.
Engadget posted a very positive review of the Samsung Galaxy II, saying that this is the best Android smartphone, and it might well be the best smartphone today. Regarding the 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus displays, they say that the screen is nothing short of spectacular. Great contrast and colors and supreme viewing angles.
"We'd even go so far as to say it's better than the iPhone 4's screen, purely because, at 4.3 inches, it gives us so much more room to work with. It's almost impossible to split the two up in terms of quality of output, they're both top notch.". Engadget says that the original Super AMOLED displays exhibited slightly grainier images due to the PenTile matrix, but the new Plus displays (which use a real-stripe matrix) has great resolution and detail. The new display also has got rid of the oversaturated colors. The only down side of the screen is the auto-brightness feature (but that has nothing to do with the OLED...).
Panasonic Corporation announced major restructuring, which includes laying off about 17,000 jobs (to reduce total employees to a level of 350,000) and reorganizing into three sectors (Consumer, Components & Devices and Solutions). The company identified four growth areas: Solar Business, water purification, devices for smartphones and OLED lighting.
PEW OLED Lighting panels
Here's Panasonic statement about OLEDs: "Panasonic recognizes OLED lighting as the next-generation lighting devices that may become equally popular as LED lighting in the market and formed a joint venture called Panasonic Idemitsu OLED Lighting with Idemitsu Kosan on April 12, 2011. Panasonic will speed up the commercialization and market development for its OLED lighting products."
A couple of weeks ago we reported about new organic-TFT developed by University of Florida researchers, and now we've got some more info. The new transistor design is carbon nanotube based and it can efficiently drive the high-currents OLEDs need, at lower voltages than other designs.
The researchers not only designed a new transistor, but they combined it with emitting materials into a single design, called an OLET (we first reported about OLETs back in May 2010). The new design is called a CN-VOLET (Carbon Nanotube Vertical OLET). They say that this new design is more than eight-times more efficient than other competing devices. It also exhibits longer lifetime and should be easy to manufacture.
Here's a nice video from Yamagata University with an introduction to OLED lighting and a lot of OLED panels and lamps prototypes:
Toshiba Mobile Display developed a 7" LTPS TFT LCD panel that has an integrated in-cell touch panel. The new LCD is only 1mm thick (about 57% thinner than a LCD with an external touch panel) and weights only 225 grams (48% less than an external-touch LCD). The integrated touch panel also reduces the surface reflection ratio by about 10%. This is basically the same technology that Samsung uses in their Super AMOLED displays.
We don't know when TMDisplay plans to actually produce such panels. They will show this technology next month at SID 2011.
Jusung Engineering (a Korean maker of semiconductor and display manufacturing equipment) announced it is entering the OLED market - for both display and lighting. Jusung will offer a 'total solution' - from vacuum deposition to encapsulation. The company currently offers 4-Gen OLED equipment, and they plan to establish a joint-venture outside of Korea to enter the worldwide OLED lighting market.
Jusung's CEO Hwang Chul-joo unveiled an OLED lighting panel that measures 730x920mm (we believe that's the largest panel ever unveiled), produced by vacuum deposition on a glass substrate. The lighting panel was produced in the company's pilot production line in Gwangju, Geongi-do. Hwang claims that their production equipment technology is at least one year ahead of the competition.
S-LCD (a joint-venture between Sony and Samsung) announced that it will reduce capital by $555 million. Kim Sun-in, an analyst at Kiwoom Securities says that this reflect a shrinking demand from Sony and the sector's overall shift in focus to OLED displays. In fact, Kim says that Samsung and Sony will eventually wind up the business to focus on OLEDs instead.
Sony 24.5-inch OLED prototype
