The Holst Centre and Solvay report advances in flexible OLED lighting panels. They present a bendable 69 cm2 OLED panel that features 30 lm/W efficiency at 1000 cd/m2:
Sony's Deputy President of home entertainment products, Noriaki Negishi, says that Sony plans to aggressively promote its own technology by 2013, including OLED televisions. Last month Sony's new CEO said that the company plans massive investments towards OLED TVs, so this makes sense, although it'll be interested to hear how the company plans to come out with a product so soon.
Sony XEL-1
Some reports suggest that Sony is actually considering buying OLED panels from LG Display. Perhaps they only plan to do so until their own manufacturing comes on line.
A couple of days ago we reported that Audi is experimenting with OLED technologies - with a concept car that has hundreds of Philips-made triangular OLED panels on the car's body. Today we present a video and more details about Audi's OLED designs:
Audi actually has 3 OLED based designs. The first is rather simple - rear lights that are made from four small red OLED panels, and a flashing turn indicator made from 8 panels. Audi actually has a roadmap for introducing OLEDs. They say that OLEDs will be used as rear lights in the "relatively near future". It will take a few more years for OLEDs to be used in brake lights as these need to be about five times brighter than rear lights.
C3Nano announced that it has raised $6.7 million in Series-B financing led by Phoenix Venture Partners. C3Nano is developing carbon-hybrid-based ink and film and this financing round should enable the company to complete its ink project and scale to production.
C3Nano's ink can be used as a low-cost alternative for ITO in flexible OLEDs, solar cells and other applications. The company claims that their material is solution-coated and printable and is more durable, flexible and transparent than ITO.
Germany launched a new research project called HARPOON that aims to improve OLED lighting's efficiency in a cost effective way. We don't have a lot of details about this project yet, but it seems that it will involve software simulation and optimizations of vacuum related production processes.
The project's coordinated is Philips, and it is partly funded by the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia. First results will be published in 2014.
Cho Soo-in, Samsung Mobile Display's CEO says that there my be strong competiton from Japanese and Chinese companies in the OLED TV market - and this may prove a great challenge for Korean companies. Japanese companies still have a competitive edge in key sources and OLED materials - which could prove an advantage for Japanese display makers.
He is also wary of Chinese makers - as he sees OLED products coming out of China in 2013. China is reportedly "vowing to join the OLED race" - the government is providing financial support for Chinese firms. Apparently Samsung does not plan to produce OLEDs in China - for fear of a technology leak - "Korea is the only country in the world that can fully handle OLED screens" according to Cho.
Samsung says that they have sold over 2 million Galaxy Note phones - 2 months after crossing over the 1 million mark. Just last week the Note started shipping in the US, for AT&T. The Note is selling great - and Samsung actually hopes to sell 10 million such phones in 2012. Samsung invented a new product category - a phone/tablet hybrid (or a phablet).
Samsung's Galaxy Note is a large Android v2.3 phone (or mini-tablet?) with a 5.3" Super AMOLED display with an HD resolution: 1280x800. Other specs include a dual-core 1.4Ghz processor, 8mp camera, touch display with pen input (it has a stylus). The phone is 9.65mm thick and weights 178 grams.
Update 2: We got new photos, more details and a video showing the three OLED applications demonstrated by Audi.
Update: We just got word from Philips saying that they are providing the OLED panels for Audi...
It turns out that Audio is experimenting with OLED lighting. The company unveiled a concept car that has hundreds of triangular OLED panels on the car's body. This sure is pretty:
