Shanghai Tianma demonstrated the company's first flexible AMOLED at the MWC 2016 exhibition. The panel is 5.46" in size and features a 720x1280 resolution and a rather large curvature radius of 20 mm.

The company also had regular glass based panels on display - a 5" and 5.5" FHD panels and also lower resolution 5" panels (720p). Tianma aims to start mass production in the second half of 2016 - but production volumes will be low as this is based on a small Gen-4.5 line.

AU Optronics announced several new display products, including some new OLED panels - a 12.3" Full-HD AMOLED display, a foldable AMOLED panel and OLED displays for smart watches and VR headsets.

The foldable panel features a thickness of only 0.1 mm and can be repeatedly folded over 200,000 times on a radius of 4 mm. This is an improvement of AUO's previous bendable panel (shown above) that was 0.2 mm thick.

Sharp announced that it will sell a two-thirds stake to Foxconn, in a deal worth $5.8 billion - but since then new material information has emerged and the deal has been put on hold. According to reports, Sharp disclosed new liabilities of around $2.7 billion. Foxconn and Sharp are still negotiating.

Foxconn aims to buy Sharp to boost its product offerings to Apple - and will make Foxconn Apple's main contract manufacturer and component supplier. Sharp is a leader in IGZO-based LCD production, and is also developing OLED technologies, although the display maker has no immediate plans to start producing AMOLED panels.

Universal Display reported their financial results for Q4 2015 - which were lower than expected. Revenues reached $62.3 million (including $30 million from SDC in licensing revenue) and the operating income was $26.6 million. Net income was $18.1 million up from $13.1 million in Q4 2014.

In 2015, UDC generated $191 million in revenues - exactly the same as in 2014. Material sales were $113.1 million and the net income was $14.7 million (down from $41.9 million in 2014, because of a large inventory write-down earlier in 2015). In 2015, UDC generated $113.6 in cash - more than double 2014's operating cash flow of $47.3 million. The company has $395.5 million in cash and equivalents.

Last week Barcelona hosted the Mobile World Congress trade show, and it was a very large and impressive conference - with over 100,000 visitors and thousands of exhibiting companies. While we were mostly focused on graphene meetings, it was very interesting to see the wide OLED adoption in mobile devices.

I'm sure we missed many demonstration (this event is simply too large!) but it was clear that most new phones (or at least a very large number of them) adopt OLEDs. Of course there were the new GS7 and GS7 edge, but many companies unveiled new OLED phones or demonstrated existing ones - including Gionee, Acer, Microsoft, ZTE, Hisense, Archos, Konka and more.

Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, gave a short keynote speech last week about Virtual Reality. Mark talks about the collaboration between Oculus (owned by Facebook) and Samsung, and specifically mentions the OLED displays - which are the only displays that can deliver a good comfortable VR experience.

Here's Mark exact quote, you can find it at about 3:45 in the full-keynote video above: "Samsung is the only company that can deliver, at scale, the low-persistence OLED screens to give a good, comfortable VR experience ,and that’s because these OLED screens are the only screens that can update faster than your eye. No other screen and display or company can deliver this experience.".

Display testing and evaluations master Raymond Soneira from DisplayMate posted a comprehensive review of the Super AMOLED displays used in Samsung's latest Galaxy S7 and S7 edge phones. Raymond says that Samsung continues to improve its OLED displays, and its new Super AMOLED displays are the best ones ever tested on a mobile device, surpassing the Super AMOLED used in the Note 5.

The GS7 display (5.1", 2560x1440, 577 PPI) is actually quite similar to the display used in the Galaxy S6, but with some significant improvements - the maximum brightness is 24% higher, and the contrast and contrast under high ambient light has also been significantly improved.

Samsung unveiled its 2016 flagship phones, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. The phones feature similar specs, but the Edge has a large display that is curved around the edges (a flexible OLED of course) and a larger battery.

The Galaxy S7 sports a flat 5.1" 2560x1440 (577 PPI) Super AMOLED display, an 12MP camera (with a new high-performance sensor), 4GB of RAM, 32/64 GB of storage, optional dual-IM, NFC and a 3,000 mAh battery. The phone has a metal and glass body and is IP68 water resistance (up to 1.5 meters for 30 min).

When LG Electronics announced that their 2016 flagship phone, the G5 will have an "always on" display, this spurred speculation that it uses an OLED display (which makes sense as an LCD will require much more power in such a mode) - but here at OLED-Info we estimated that LGD will not be able to produce enough OLED panels for a new LGE flagship.

LG unveiled the G5 today, and indeed it uses an LCD - a 5.3" 1440x2560 one, in fact. This new smartphone is exciting early reviewers with it good looks, high-end specs, removable battery and plug-in modules.

Applied Materials' financial results for Q4 2015 were better than expected, and the company also issued a strong guidance going forward. In their display business segment, the company sees accelerated strategic investment from customers - particularly for OLED displays.

In 2015, the company's OLED system bookings reached $150 million. Applied traditionally offered backplane (LTPS and IGZO) deposition systems, and the company recently entered the OLED encapsulation market as well - which is seen as a growth driver for Applied.