In March 2014 Konica Minolta announced that it is starting to construct a R2R flexible OLED lighting fab with plans to start production in the fall of 2014. The company now updates that the equipment is now running, and first panel samples are being produced. KM still aims to start shipping commercial products in the fall.

Konica invested ¥10 billion (almost $100 million) in the new fab, which will have a monthly capacity of a million panels. This will represent a breakthrough in OLED lighting capacity.

UBI Research estimates that the OLED lighting market will take off in 2015, and will grow to reach $4.7 billion in revenue by 2020. According to UBI within three years a 100x100 mm OLED lighting panel will cost under $5 to produce. This is assuming a large substrate (1270x1270 mm), a fast production process and a tandem structure.

In such a scenario, the largest cost (over 80%) will be for the OLED materials. This means that at that stage companies will put most of their focus on lowering the material usage and cheaper OLED materials.

Last month Samsung announced their latest smart watch, the Gear S, with a flexible (curved) 2" 360x480 (300 PPI) plastic-based Super AMOLED display. The Gear S includes a 3G chip (it doesn't have to be paired with a smartphone) and Samsung now announced that it is coming to the US "this fall" - and will be available from AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless.

The Gear S runs the Tizen OS, and includes seven sensors: accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, heart rate, ambient light, UV and barometer. It weights 67 grams (blue black edition) or 84 grams for the white edition and includes a 300 mAh battery which should last for two days.

Check out this nice video, showing how to quickly and easily (well, if you have what it takes to do these kind of things) develop your own decorative OLED lamp:

The DIY blogger behind this lamp calls herself (or himself) Apple Tree. The 100x100 mm OLED panel used in this video is made by LG Chem.

Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled their latest iPhones, the 6 (4.7", 1334x750) and 6 Plus (5.5", 1920x1080) - both with new IPS LCD displays. The measurement experts at DisplayMate did their usual methodical testing on these new phones and compared these to the latest LCD and OLED displays.

Apple included several technical display enhancements in these new displays - like Photo aligned IPS, Dual Domain pixels, and Improved Polarizers. According to DisplayMate, these are indeed very good displays, and the iPhone 6 Plus is the best performing smartphone LCD display ever tested. The iPhone 6 has pretty much the same display, but the lower resolution means rescaled images do not look as good.

Samsung announced that the Galaxy Note 4 will ship the US on October 17th, with pre-orders starting today. The note will cost $299 with a two-year contract on AT&T or Verizon, or $31.24 per month (for 24-months) with T-Mobile. The Note 4 will ship in Europe a bit sooner.

The Galaxy Note 4 has a 5.7" QHD (2560x1440, 518 PPI) Super AMOLED display. According to DisplayMate, it is the best mobile display they ever tested.

According to Digitimes, some "industry sources" say that LG Electronics dropped its OLED TV sales target for 2015 from 5 million TVs to only 800,000. LG still expects OLED to become the mainstream TV display technology in the future.

While it ain't good to hear that LG is less optimistic, it should also be noted that the 5 million sales target (which indeed we heard from one LG executive) was never realistic. LGD's upcoming Gen-8 M2 OLED production line (which is still not online) will have a monthly capacity of 26,000 substrates - or about 150,000 55" panels. Assuming 100% yields (which is not achievable, obviously) - that's only 1.8 million panels in a year, assuming full production capacity is achieved on January 1st.

Ten days ago Apple unveiled the Apple Watch, their first smartwatch product. The company did not reveal the display technology - they just said it was a flexible Retina display. The Watch itself will only be released in "early 2015", and I thought we'd have a long time to wait before we know whether this is an OLED or LCD display.

But according to several sources, it is now confirmed that the Watch uses an OLED. I cannot disclose all the sources, but my trusted and knowledgeable friend Jennifer Colegrove from Touch Display Research says she's 100% sure it is an AMOLED (it is interesting that in June 2013 Jennifer forecasted that Apple will adopt an AMOLED in a product within 18 months, and she hit it right on the mark).

Alkilu was established in 2013 with an aim to develop innovative consumer OLED lighting products, and the company unveiled their low cost OLED products at CES 2014, with aims to release them later in 2014. They are still not shipping OLEDs yet (despite accepting pre-orders on their web site since June).

Some Alkilu products (for example the Trio OLED Light shown above) us OLED panels made by LG Chem - which is also a marketing partner. Alkilu now announced that it signed a formal partnership with Visionox for OLED panel supply. Going forward, Alkilu plans to offer devices that use panels from both companies. Alkilu will buy the larger OLED panels from LG Chem, while the smaller ones will come from Visionox. The Visionox panels will be custom-designed and will offer some color variations.

In March 2014, Vrvana (TRG back then) announced the Totem Virtual-Reality headset - a competitor to Oculus Rift's OLED-based HMD. After months in development, Vrvana launched a kickstarter campaign to raise $350,000. As of the time of writing, they raised almost $100,000 - with 28 days to go so this looks like a promising project.

The headset includes a Full-HD RGB-Stripe AMOLED display, HDMI input and 11 sensors (including 2 cameras and 3 gyros). It supports the Unreal, Unity, Havok and CryEngine engines, and can be used with a PC, A PS3/PS4 and Xbox One & 360. An early-bird edition via Kickstarter costs around $400.