The Polish Academy of Science is organizing two new OLED related summer schools in 2014. Those International Krutyn Summer Schools are high-level and highly intensive scientific events that include training in the form of lectures and scientific consulting sessions designed for PhD students and young researchers seeking to reinforce their knowledge and skills.

The first event (summer school #15) focuses on organic photonics and electronics, with profound emphasis on revolutionary TADF emitters as OLED materials replacing expensive platinum group metallacycles. The week long event (June 8 to June event is organized jointly by Japan's Kyushu University and Poland's Supramolecular Chemistry Network Foundation, and the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Back in February, Plastic Logic and Novaled (owned by Samsung) announced that throughout 2014 they will demonstrate truly flexible, plastic, full-organic AMOLED displays. The first demo in February was of a monochrome (red) display - and actually it was only shown on a presentation slide. But Plastic Logic promised us that they will show better prototypes as the year progresses.

True to their word, last week, at the Printed Electronics Europe event, plastic logic showed a monochrome 4" 360x128 (95 PPI) flexible AMOLED prototype. This time it was a real demo, as you can see from the photo above. This full-organic AMOLED panel uses Plastic Logic's flexible OTFT backplane and the whole panel can be bent and rolled and still show the image.

Today Samsung is launching the Galaxy S5 worldwide. In the US, both AT&T and Sprint offer it for $189 (with a plan) or $699 unlocked. The GS5 features a 5.1" FHD (432 PPI, Diamond Pixel ) Super AMOLED display, a 2.5 Ghz quad-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 16MP camera (4K video support). The GS5 is dust and water resistant, and it packs a finger scanner and a heart rate sensor.

The 5.1" Super AMOLED display was tested by DisplayMate, who found it to be the best mobile display on the market - outperforming all other OLED and LCD displays as it features the highest brightness, the lowest reflectance, the highest color accuracy, the highest contrast rating in ambient light and the smallest brightness variation with viewing angle.

Universal Display Corporation (UDC) is one of the most known OLED company, involved with OLED IP, OLED phopshorescent materials, innovations on flexible OLEDs, production processes and more. As the most prominent public OLED company, the company is interesting to many investors and analysts.

Last year UDC hired Darice Liu to handle communications and investor relations. Darice was kind enough to answer a few questions I had regarding UDC's technology and business. These are interesting times for UDC as the OLED market is growing quickly, OLED TVs and flexible OLEDs are finally appearing on the market, but on the other hand the company is being faced with patent litigation and criticism from some investors (whom I shall not name).

BMW hosted a workshop called "Light Days" which detailed the history, present and future of lighting in automobiles. BMW says that the future lighting technology will be OLED, and they expect to start selling cars with OLED lighting within 3 years.

BMW says that the high homogeneity of OLEDs has several advantages (as you can see in the slide above) - mainly that it enables new styling options, it's efficient and long lasting and can offer high exclusivity. The company showed a prototype taillight design that uses Philips OLEDs. We also know that LG Chem are collaborating with BMW. This design seems pretty similar to Hella's own OLED prototype (which uses LG Chem's panels).

LG Chem had a large presence at L+B 2014, and the company sent us a few photos and a video of their OLEDs in action. In the past few weeks, the company announced new 320x110 mm panels and also the world's largest OLED at 320x320 mm. All of their new panels feature an increased lifetime (to 40,000 LT70) and a high CRI (over 90).

LG Chem also revealed their efficiency roadmap. Currently all their panels feature 60 lm/W. They already developed 100 lm/W panels and these will be released commercially later in 2014. By 2016 the company hopes to reach 140 lm/W. The standard luminance of the company's panels is 3000 cd/m², but they can also supply panels with 5,000 or even 8000 cd/m² (this decreases the lifetime, though).

AUO announced that they developed a new 5.7" WQHD (2560x1440, 513 PPI) AMOLED panel. The panel is ultra slim at 0.57 mm and it uses special driver design to increase touch sensitivity and as a result can support 10 touch points.

AUO says that this is the world's highest resolution AMOLED. Actually we know that Sharp, and SEL developed a 13.3" 8K CAAC-OS OLED that achieves 664 PPI - but this one hasn't been unveiled yet (it will be shown at SID 2014 in a couple of months). In addition Samsung Display announced a while back that they are developing a 5.2" WQHD panel which will have a pixel density of 560 PPI. Reportedly SDC is also planning to make a UHD panel that will have a PPI of 860 (!).

DisplaySearch says that curved TV shipments will reach almost 800,000 units worldwide in 2014, and sales will grow to over 6 million by 2017. DisplaySearch sees curved TV as a novelty that will actually wear off with time and shipments will trail off in time.

Even though the first curved TV were OLED TVs, there are also curved LCDs and in fact DisplaySearch says that the majority of curved TV shipments will be LCDs (not surprising really as OLED TV prices will remain high in the near future).

Rumors about an Apple OLED TV started circulating in 2011, and every so often we hear another report that suggests that such a TV will be released soon. Yesterday The Korea Herald that a local Korean company (which can only be LG Display) produced 65" OLED sample panels for Apple.

Apple's reported plan is to launch the OLED TV in 2015, but the plans aren't final. It seems that Apple originally hoped to start shipping around 2 million 65" and 77" LCD TVs in 2014 - but the company was not happy with the LCD display quality and have decided to shift to OLED panels. Apple is also still struggling to sign agreement with content providers.

Samsung's Gear Fit is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com for $199. The smart wearable fitness band will ship on April 11th. The Gear Fit uses a flexible (curved) 1.84" (432x128) Super AMOLED display.

The Gear Fit is currently #7 in Amazon's Cell Phone Accessory Kits best selling list. Most of the items in this list cost 2 or 3 dollars, so it may mean that the Galaxy Fit has already been ordered by many people (I'm not sure how popular are those items really int hat list).