Nokia's Lumia 800 is now available in the UK for the Orange network. They say that pre-order demand has been great - in fact it has been the best ever for any Nokia phone. Orange currently offers a free XBOX 360 console with each upgrade - that probably helped... The Lumia 800 is Nokia's first Windows Phone - and it sports a 3.7" WVGA (854x480) ClearBlack AMOLED display. Other features include a 1.4Ghz CPU, 512MB RAM, 16GB of internal memory and a 8mp, f/2.2 aperture camera with carl zeiss optics. The Lumia 800 is made from durable polycarbonate plastic.

Samsung's Galaxy Nexus is now shipping in the UK (with a contract). It will be available sim-free on December 2nd, for £519 (you can pre-order now). The Galaxy Nexus is the first Android v4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) smartphone. It features a 4.65" HD Super AMOLED display (1280x720, using PenTile technology) with a curved glass, a dual-core 1.2Ghz CPU, Full-HD video encoding, 5nmp camera, NFC, 1GB of RAM and 16/32GB of internal memory.

Back in June, Lumiotec announced a couple of new OLED lamps: the Vanity desk lamp and the world's cheapest OLED lamp, the $450 Hanger. Both use a single square OLED panel (we reviewed a previous generation panel back in September 2010). They were kind enough to send both lamps for a review, and after a few weeks of dealings with the Israeli customs, the lamps finally arrived and here's my review.

Both lamps use Lumiotec's Version-2 square OLED panels (14.5 x 14.5 mm active area) which feature a color temperature of 4,900K and a maximum luminance of 2,700 cd/m2. The panels are not very efficient at 10.5 lm/W (they use all-fluorscent OLEDs). The Hanger consumes 12 W while the Vanity consumes 13 W (the extra Watt is because of the electric touch sensor, more on this below). Here's our hands-on review of Lumiotec's Version-1 panels.

Nokia's ClearBlack Display technology has been announced in September 2010, but only now did they explained this technology fully. We knew that CBD adds a polarizing filter to a display (which can be either an LCD or an OLED) - but Nokia now tells us that the filter is placed between the touch layer and the actual display - which enables it to block incoming light and not harm the contrast or color quality. In the photo below, we can see a normal C6-01 phone with a CBD display (on the left) and the same phone without the CBD layer (on the right):

While the technology behind CBD displays is quite different to the one used in Samsung's Super AMOLED displays (which uses an on-cell touch layer) - the resulting image quality and behavior under sunlight is pretty similar in both display technologies.

The Holst Centre released a short video showing a new 30x30 cm flexible OLED lighting panel on a metal foil:

We don't have any more details yet, but this is quite a nice prototype...

Sim4tec has released a new version (v4.0) of their OLED simulation software, SimOLED. The major new addition is the FITTING modules which generates reliable physical organic material parameters like HOMO, LUMO, mobilities and traps based on simple experimental data like I-V curves.

Other new features:

• Enhanced super-fast steady-state solver for quick extraction of electrical material parameters
• New, fast steady-state solver for calculating electrical and optical key figures of complete OLEDs in a matter of seconds
• Switching of light direction for bottom and top emission configuration

Update: according to new reports, JD may convert the Panasonic plant to LTPS and later to AMOLED production, which may start in 2013...

There are reports that Japan Display (the new small/medium display maker that merged Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba's businesses) plans to accelerate OLED mass production. They plan to invest $1.3 billion in OLED R&D (which probably includes pilot production plants), and later on invest a further $1.4 billion towards mass production. We don't know when they actually plan to start producing panels.

Back in September, when Japan Display was just formed, representatives from Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba said that they certainly consider OLEDs to be the 'core technology' of the next generation small size and medium size displays, and will invest in OLED R&D. It's good to hear that now they are accelerating those plans.

Samsung's Focus Flash is now shipping for AT&T - free with a contract. The Focus Flash is a 'budget' Windows phone 7.5 (Mango) phone with a 3.7" Super AMOLED display. Other features include a 1.4Ghz processor and a 5mp camera.

OSRAM announced that they developed a new flexible OLED with an efficiency of 32 lm/W - which makes is the world's most efficient OLED lighting panel (according to OSRAM). The new panel is made on a thin steel foil with a thickness of approximately 100 micrometers - like a sheet of paper. OSRAM developed a new electrode design for this top-emitter OLED panel, which brightness is fixed at 1,000 cd/m².

OSRAM's flexible OLED research was conducted as part of the TOPAS 2012 project - the same project in which OSRAM developed the 87 lm/W white OLED panel back in June.

OSD Displays announces a new 1.45" color PMOLED module (the OSD160128P0907-10) that features 160x128 resolution, a thin profile (1.6mm) and a light weight (3.6 grams). According to OSD, this is the first such PMOLED that offers a resolution larger than 128x128.

The OSD160128P907-10 is highly adaptable to customer designs supporting parallel RGB interfaces 6/16/18 bit configurations, CPU/MCU type interfaces of 8/16/18 bits in both i80 and 68xx standards, and even supports a 4-wire SPI mode. The display hardware terminates on a 35 conductor, 0.5mm pitch tail which is compatible with flex-to-board ZIF type connectors by customer systems.