According to ETNews, Apple has contracted LG Display to start producing OLED panels for its smartphones. LG Display will produce the new OLEDs at its E6 production line in Paju, and will start shipping panels to Apple in December 2018.

The report says that LGD will ship around 400,000 panels to Apple by the end of 2018. The cost of each panel is around $90. This deal is important for LGD, and also for Apple as it wants to diversify its OLED supplier base. According to other reports, these LGD panels will only be used as repair panels by Apple, and will not be integrated into new iPhones.

Samsung's annual US developer conference is starting today, and rumors suggest that the company will unveil its first foldable device (the Galaxy F?) during the event. Samsung Mobile's Facebook page profile image was changed today to the one you see below - which surely suggests something foldable:

Hopefully we'll know more soon. For a few months now we hear that Samsung foldable device launch will take place in November, and according to the latest estimates the device will sport a 7.3" OLED display that folds inside. The device will also sport an external, smaller AMOLED.

Departures magazine (a premium magazine shipped to around 25,000 American Express Platinum Card members) included an innovative ad for Audi's A8 with flexible OLED lighting panels that are activated when first opened (and also when the reader clicks on a replica Audi key that is included with the magazine).

Personally this seems to be an overly expensive and wasteful way to advertise. We do not know what kind of OLED panels are used in the ads (which was produced by US-based Structural Graphics). In 2017 Konica Minolta Pioneer OLED (KMPO) demonstrated its simple flexible OLED lighting panels integrated into packaging technology - which could be the one adopted here (although other companies have demonstrated similar solutions as well).

Last week we reported that some Huawei Mate 20 Pro complain about a green tint in the smartphone's 6.39" 1440x3120 AMOLED display.

In our original post we reported that these displays are produced by BOE. However, according to Hernán Castañón (@hema), Huawei actually uses OLEDs produced by both LG Display and BOE - and all the faulty phones are one that use LGD made panels.

Panasonic is demonstrating a new transparent OLED TV "Smart Glass" prototype at the China International Import Expo tradeshow in Shanghai. We do not have any specification of this panel.

In September 2017 Panasonic demonstrated a 55" 4K transparent OLED, this could be the same display but we are not sure. We do not know who's the producer of the panel itself, but it is likely to be LG Display.

Japan-based printed OLED developer JOLED announced that it will demonstrate a 55" 4K printed OLED TV at Finetech Japan 2018 (December 5-7 2018). JOLED will also introduce its proprietary printed OLED manufacturing technology. A few weeks ago JOLED announced that it has signed an agreement to develop, manufacture, and sell printing equipment together with Panasonic and Screen Finetech.

This is the first time JOLED will show a 55" OLED prototype (in July 2018 the company did include TVs in its future roadmap). JOLED tells us that it has no plans to produce large size OLEDs at this stage - and this TV is on display just to demonstrate JOLED's printing technology.

LG Electronics demonstrated its 65" rollable OLED TV prototype in 2018, showing how such a display can be used to create a TV that rolls into its base.

Engadget says that LG has plans to showcase a rollable TV again in CES 2019 (January 9-11). Engadget says that according to its information the rollable TV will take "center stage" in next year's event - which may point to the fact that LG is close to commercializing such a TV. In 2017 LGD did say it plans to bring rollable OLED TVs to market by 2020.

The Washington Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler posted an interesting article in which he details how new smartphones are under-performing older ones in terms of battery life. Geoffrey puts 12 smartphones to the same test, and checks which ones dies first.

It is interesting that the new 2018 smartphones under performs similar smartphones released in 2017. Geoffrey's conclusion is that new display technology - high resolution OLEDs, are the culprit. The main reasoning behind that is that the iPhone XR (with its LCD display) performs better than the iPhone XS, even though the XR has a smaller display.

BOE is ramping up its AMOLED production, and according to CLSA its target for the second half of 2018 is to produce 3 million panels. BOE is reportedly the supplier of AMOLED panels to Huawei's Mate 20 Pro smartphone, but CLSA says that the company is struggling to find customers from other smartphone makers.

According to CINNO, BOE produced around 1.7 million panels in the first half of 2018 - which means that it plans to almost double its shipments in the second half of the year.

MagnaChip announced its Q3 2018 financial results -with revenues of $206 million, and an operating income of $18.3 million. MagnaChip's OLED display drive revenues reached $58.3 (up 232.2% from Q3 2017) and are on track to set a revenue record in 2018 (MagnaChip best ever OLED year was in 2016 with $161 million in revenues).

During the quarter, six smartphones with MagnaChip's OLED drivers were launched (as expected) and the company continued to win several new designs for smartphones in Asia.