Japan Display announced that they decided to build a pilot OLED display manufacturing line in its Ishikawa Plant. The company will start to setup the manufacturing equipment towards the end of 2013, and small-scale mass production will begin in the spring of 2014.

This new pilot line will be a 4.5-Gen fab (730x920 mm) with a capacity of 4,000 substrates a month. While this is good news to hear JDI commit to an OLED line, it means that we shouldn't expect real AMOLED mass production from them till at least 2015.

Samsung has high hopes for the Galaxy S4 (they actually hope to sell over 100 million units - or double the GS3 sales). Today the company reported that they will soon reach 10 million units sold - less than a month after launching the phone (update: on May 23 Samsung announced that indeed they reached the 10 million sales mark).

The GS3 took 50 days to reach 10 million in sales, so the GS4 is selling at a much faster rate (almost double the rate actually). Google just announced that they will offer a GS4 model with stock Android 4.2 on their Google Play on June 26 for $649, this won't hurt sales rate I guess.

Corning announced their new, second-generation Lotus XT glass for high performance displays (LCDs and OLEDs). The Lotus XT offers better dimensional stability and can withstand higher temperatures compared to the previous version.

The new glass features better total-pitch variation (the distance features move during panel processing). All this means that using the new glass shall increase production yields and result in more precise manufacturing. The new glass can be used as substrate for LTPS and Oxide-TFT backplanes.

Thorn Lighting installed a semi-permanent OLED lighting installation in the entrance to Thorn's Academy of Light in Spennymoor, UK. The installation (that has two fixtures) uses LG Chem's 65lmW-1 panels (@3500K) together with some LED lamps (they call this an asymmetric luminaire).

Thorn says this is a "concept" design and not a real product. The installation was "inspired" by the Topdrawer project, but it wasn't part of this project as such. The installation was created as a collaboration between Thorn Lighting, Octo Design, Tridonic and Durham University.

SilenceSolutions unveiled a new telephone box, which uses five Philips Lumiblade GL350 OLED lighting panels (probably the first-gen ones at 115 lumens each). I guess the idea is to have a small silent place to conduct your phone conversations. Nice design anyway...

According to reports from Korea, Samsung finally decided to stay with direct-emission (RGB architecture) in its upcoming OLED TV. Samsung's managed to increase the production yields in their pilot line to 60%, and this will be enough to launch their first OLED TVs in July 1st, 2013.

Samsung is also expected to start investing in an 8-Gen OLED TV line soon. This new line, as we said, will produce direct-emission OLEDs. According to earlier reports Samsung did consider using LG's WRGB architecture because it's easier to produce.

The US Patent Office granted Samsung a new patent (#537228) that describes a bendable TV. The idea is that you can use a remote control to bend the television so you'll get a better viewing angle:

Samsung says that this TV uses a flexible display panel (probably an OLED TV, but it is not mentioned in the patent) and a back panel that can deform the display. In addition, the whole TV sits on a unit that can be rotated. The TV will include special software that adjusts the image so it is not distorted by the bending.

Amazon announced that it bought Samsung's Electrowetting display unit (formerly LiquaVista). The sum was undisclosed, but it probably was not a large sum (reportedly Samsung wanted to sell it for less than $100 million).

Compared to E Ink panels, Electrowetting displays can feature brighter color and much faster refresh rates, while still being very low on power. On the other hand the display technology hasn't been commercialized yet. Which makes the Amazon purchase a bit puzzling (after all Amazon is not a display maker and not an IP company). Perhaps Amazon hopes this kind of technology may enable them to build a unique e-reader/tablet hybrid device?

E Ink announced that it will begin to produce 13.3" 1200x1600 plastic-based flexible E Ink panels (called Mobius) in 2013. Those Mobius panels weigh just 60 grams and will be much more rugged compared to the company's glass based panels. The panels use Sony's flexible TFT technologies (that were transferred to E Ink for the production).

Sony already unveiled a prototype tablet that will uses those displays. This tablet is aimed towards the educational market and Sony hopes to launch it by March 2014. The prototype device uses a touch display (with stylus support), 4GB of memory (with microSD) and Wi-Fi. The whole device is just 6.8 mm thick and weighs just 385 grams.

Global OLED Technology (GOT) signed a patent licensing agreement with LG Display. LG Display will pay royalties to GOT, and that's all we know about this agreement. It's a bit surprising because I always assumed LG Display already signed such an agreement years ago.

GOT was established in December 2009 when LG bought Kodak's OLED business (in a deal that was estimated at $100 million). GOT owns more than two thousand OLED related patents, and licenses them to other companies (for example PIOL and OLEDWorks). In 2010, Idemistu Kosan bought 32% of GOT.