Back in June Samsung said it hopes to sell 10 million Galaxy S3 phones by July. Today Samsung confirmed that by mid July they reached their sales target, even though they faced some component shortages.

The S3 has a 4.8" 1280x720 HD Super AMOLED (with Pentile), a quad-core 1.4Ghz CPU (1.5Ghz dual core in the US), 1GB of RAM (2GB in the US) and an 8 mp camera (1080p video) and lot's of new software features. The phone weighs 133 grams and is only 8.6 mm thick.

LG Display announced that it is establishing a new OLED research center at Seoul National University (SNU). LG engineers and SNU professors and students will use the center to develop materials and technologies used in OLED displays. LGD will fund all the projects in the center.

It seems that one of the areas researched in the new lab will be flexible OLEDs. LGD was recently chosen by the Korean government to lead a research project aiming for flexible 60" UHD OLED TVs by 2017. Perhaps the new center will aid LG in that project.

Toshiba held an R&D open house at its Tokyo Headquarters, showing up a few future projects. One of them is OLED lighting. Toshiba unveiled prototype panels that are very efficient at 91 lm/W (@1000 cd/m2). Toshiba hopes to start selling their OLED lighting panels by early 2015.

Back in 2010 it was reported that Toshiba (or TMDisplay, really) is scrapping plans for OLED displays, but will continue to do R&D in OLED lighting manufacturing equipment. In May 2011 Toshiba produced 100 OLED based portable lamps and distributed them to quake-hit areas in Japan. Toshiba produced those panels, and Universal Display donated OLED materials and technology for those lamps. It's highly likely that Toshiba is using phosphorescent materials in their new lamp (getting to 91 lm/W with a fluorescent-only design is highly unlikely).

Panasonic announced they will soon release two new OLED lighting panels (and modules). The new panels will feature daylight white (5000K) and natural white (4000K) and will complement the already available bulb-color (3000K) panels). The panels, made by Panasonic Idemitsu OLED Lighting (PIOL) are already shipping and the modules (which include a built-in control circuit) will ship in August.

The panels feature a CRI of over 90, a lifetime of 10,000 hours (LT70) and an efficiency if 26-30 lm/W. They are 2 mm thick. The panels luminance: 2,600 cd/m² (5000K), 2800cd/m² (4000K), 3000cd/m² (3000K).

A couple of days ago we reported that China has established a new OLED industry alliance. It turns out that the alliance was actually established back in June 2011, and today we bring you some more information.

The alliance is officially called the China OLED Industry Alliance and it was formed with an aim to help grow the Chinese OLED industry. The alliance is headed by the Chinese Government and includes19 member companies, including Rainbow corporation, Irico, Visionox, Tianma, TCL, BOE Display , First-O-Lite, OLightek,Sichuan CCO, Aglaia Tech, Jilin Optical and Electronic materials and others.

A new company called Stimulated Blue Technology was established a couple of months ago in Henan, China, with an aim to produce small OLED panels based on its patented blue-coating technology, developed by Xinyang Normal University. It's not clear what this technology is, but according to the article it involves some sort of blue-coating or filter layer and only red and green OLED emitters. I'm not sure what does that mean exactly, or how is that possible...

The company is setting up a 4.5-Gen (730x920 mm) fab in Henan that will produce Metal-Oxide TFT based OLEDs. The capacity will be 360,000 substrates a year. The same fab will include two OLED lines and one LED-LCD line. The total investment for the OLED lines is 2.2 billion yuan (about $345 million) Apparently the company is confident it will be able to raise the required funds. The first OLED line is scheduled for the end of 2012, and the second one for 2014.

Last months we heard reports that Coasia Microelectronics (a Samsung component distributor) is expected to get new AMOLED panel orders from several Chinese handset makers. Today Digitimes reports that Coasia is now supplying Samsung's AMOLED panels for Xiaomi OPPO and Gionee, and will start shipping panels in Q3 2012.

Supreme, another Samsung distributor, is also entering the Chinese market, and the company delivered AMOLED samples to ZTE, Hisense and TCL. They expect to start shipping panels in Q4 2012.

Universal Display have entered into a three-year strategic alliance with Plextronics to develop and commercialize soluble OLED material systems. The new OLED systems will use combine Plextronics' HIL and HTL materials with UDC's PHOLED emissive materials. UDC also made a $4 million investment in Plextronics.

UDC and Plextronics were already collaborating before. Back in November 2010 Plextronics said that UDC's P2OLED system uses their HIL materials and OC NQ Ink.

Philips is going to reduce its large OLED lighting panel prices. All large OLEDs (whether dot, rectangle or tall) will cost only â‚¬86. This is quite a drop - the large rectangular for example currently costs â‚¬269. If you buy two large OLED panels, you'll get the electronics for free.

Philips is also going to release a new starter kit for its new GL350 functional lighting panel. The kit will include three GL350 panels, one short circuit protection (SCP3001), one Xitanium driver and all the required connector cables. The price will be €400.

There are some interesting reports that the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) decided to reduce its backing for Foxconn's plans to establishing LCD fabs in Brazil. It seems that the Brazilian Government is not happy with Foxconn's decision to produce LCD panels and not OLEDs - as they were hoping that the company will produce next-gen technology based panels in Brazil.

Foxconn's investment in the new fab was supposed to be $4 billion (that's only the first phase, the total cost would have been around $12 billion). The BNDES was supposed to fund 30% of the project. BNDES and Foxconn are still in negotiation, trying to reach a new agreement.