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.
OLEDs are now being used in most flagship phones, and also in mid-range phones as well. The only company that seems not to adopt OLEDs (besides Apple, of course) is LG - but this will change soon once the company ramps up small-size OLED production.
But OLEDs are not limited for mobile phones, of course. Most VR headsets use OLED displays - including those from Oculus, HTC, Samsung and Sony. I had the good chance to test drive some of these VR headsets, and the experience was very impressive.
It is again interesting to note that LG chose to use an LCD in their new VR headset G5 accessory. I guess LG simply cannot buy an OLED display from Samsung, its arch-rival, or that Samsung will not supply to LG.
I believe that the VR headset market will prove a very large market for OLED displays, reaching tens of millions of units in a few years. OLEDs have a clear advantage over LCDs in this market - LCDs suffer from a slow response rate and thus cannot deliver the same experience an OLED does. Espon launched a new augmented-reality system, the Moverio BT-300, and this new model adopts two OLED microdisplays. I tested Epson's new glasses and they are quite terrific!
I will post more in-depth articles on those new OLED devices, soon, so stay tuned!
