Samsung's latest smart watch, the Gear S, is now shipping in the US. AT&T offers it for $200 with a two-year contact and you can also get it unlocked for $355.

The Gear S has a flexible (curved) 2" 360x480 (300 PPI) plastic-based Super AMOLED display and it includes a 3G chip so it doesn't have to be paired with a smartphone. Other features include Tizen OS, seven sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, heart rate, ambient light, UV and barometer) and a 300 mAh battery that should last for two days.

DisplayCentral posted an interesting article on LG Display's OLED TV program. The author reports from a discussion he had with Changho Oh, Senior VP for LG Display’s OLED TV Development Division, in which Changho says that LGD is investing heavily in soluble OLED production and aims to have such panels available in 2018.

A few days ago we reported that an LG Display researcher revealed that the company is developing a roll-to-roll process to produce flexible OLED displays. This is one of several possible printing technologies that can make soluble OLED panels possible.

Last month it was reported that Kaneka developed a new OLED panel that achieves a lifetime of 50,000 hours, almost double from the company's current OLEDs. Now it is reported that Kaneka already started producing these new OLEDs, and samples have been sent to some customers for evaluation.

Kaneka further reveals that the 50,000 hours refers to LT70 (i.e. until the brightness falls to 70% of its original value). They measure at 3,000 cd². As their previous panels had a lifetime of about 17,000 hours (LT70), this means they actually almost tripled the lifetime. This improvement was achieved by optimizing the device structure, and a more accurate thin-film deposition process.

eMagin, the OLED microdisplay maker, reported their financial results for Q3 2014. Revenues in Q3 were $5.7 million (down from $6.3 million in Q3 2014), and the net loss was $1 million. The company has about $6 million in cash and equivalents, up from $5.6 million in June 2014. eMagin XGA096 OLED-XL

The lower-than-expected revenues were due to scheduled maintenance on the OLED deposition tools (eMagin did not produce displays for a month during the quarter), the bonding stop-ship event from Q1 which means that eMagin is still not shipping to those two large customers (shipments are expected to resume in 2015).

Samsung unveiled a new wearable fitness tracker reference platform called SIMBAND. The SIMBAND is aimed towards device makers that can customize and change its design to create their own wearable trackers.

The SIMBAND looks very similar to the Gear S, and it too uses a 2" curved flexible AMOLED. The SIMBAND also uses several sensors (optical, electrical and physical) that enables it to track the heart rate, blood flow and pressure, skin temperature, CO₂ and oxygen levels and EKG. It uses an ARM-based CPU and has a hot-swappable battery.

Samsung announced today that the Gear VR (Innovator Edition) will arrive in the US next month. The Gear VR will cost $199 ($249 bundled with a Bluetooth gamepad). Of course you will also need a Galaxy Note 4 (with its 5.7" QHD Super AMOLED) to use this VR HMD.

Samsung's Gear VR is a Virtual Reality Headset (developed together with Oculus VR) that uses a Galaxy Note 4 for the screen, processor, sensors and audio.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer FEP Institute demonstrated new UV-emitting OLED devices that can be used as low-cost personal diagnostic devices. The German research institute demonstrated two OLED devices, one emitting in the near-UV and another in the green spectral range. Both can be integrated to sensor applications.

The Fraunhofer showed sample sensors that integrate both the OLED deices and photo-detectors with tunable spectral characteristics. The green OLED is a top-emitting OLED that has a thin-film optical filter and thin-film encapsulation - so that a sample substrate can be brought to be very close to the excitation source.

An LG Display researcher revealed that the company is developing a roll-to-roll process to produce flexible OLED displays. LG says this will enable them to make very flexible displays and reduce production costs.

LG Display also seeks to replace the aluminum electrodes with copper ones. This will again decrease costs and will also enable higher-resolution displays. There are some concerns with copper electrodes over environmental hazards but LGD apparently resolved those issues.

The OLED Association published an interesting chart today showing their forecast for flexible OLED capacity at Samsung Display (SDC) and LG Display (LGD) from 2014 to 2018. The OLED-A sees rapid growth ahead, with SDC's and LGD's combined capacity growing from 800K sq. m in 2015 to 5,600K sq. m by 2017.

As you can see from the chart, SDC will continue to have a much larger flexible OLED capacity than LG. SDC is constructing a 6-Gen flexible OLED line - with aims to start production in Q1 2015.

Engadget posted a review of Samsung's Galaxy Note Edge - and all in all they are very happy with the device. They state that it is pretty much a Galaxy Note 4 - but more expensive and of course with the curved display - which still seems like an experiment in design.

Regarding the screen, Engadget says it looks great - and it's similar to the Note 4. DisplayMate also confirmed this a while back, SDC's plastic OLEDs offer pretty much the same performance as SDC's glass-based OLEDs. Some people like and adore the curve, it's certainly an attention grabber. Engadget did not find it to be very useful though and the review said that eventually he disabled most of the widgets on the edge. For left-handed users, the phone is not ideal a the curve is in the opposite direction.