OLED Tablets - Introduction and Latest Industry News - Page 16

A few weeks ago Japan's Nikkei Asian Review posted an article saying that Samsung decided to scrap their plans for an OLED TV fab. According to Nikkei's report, Samsung decided to setup a new facility to produce small and medium sized OLED panels.

Today Korea's Yonhap news posted an article saying that Samsung indeed decided to setup a new AMOLED fab. Samsung may increase its CapEX spending by 8.6% in 2014 (to $24.4 billion). The investment in the new OLED fab in Asan will be between $3 billion to $5 billion.

Update: Samsung now sent formal invitations. We only have a few weeks before they hopefully reveal their OLED tablets...

Samsung's 8.4" and 10.5" OLED tablets seem to be getting closer - a report from Korea suggests that Samsung will unveil the new tablets in an unpacked event in New York on June 12 (that's less than a month away).

According to several reports in the past months, Samsung's new OLED tablets will sport WQXGA (2560x1600) resolution - for both the 8.4" display and the 10.5" one.

In the past few months, we heard many rumors regarding Samsung's upcoming OLED tablets. It seems that Samsung are getting closer to launching these new tablets, as the new rumors are getting more and more detailed.

The latest report from SamMobile says that Samsung decided to name the OLED tablet lineup the Galaxy Tab S. There will be two display sizes - 8.4" and 10.5", and both will have the same WQXGA (2560x1600) resolution.

Over the past few months we heard several reports that Samsung will soon release AMOLED tablets. Most of these reports suggested that the tablets will have screen sized 8" and 10.5" and will be premium but mass-produced tablets. Now the SamMobile blog says they confirmed that Samsung is indeed developing an OLED tablet that will use a 2560x1600 display.

The screen size itself is unknown yet, but it will probably indeed be between 8" to 10". According to SamMobile, there will be three variants for this table (Wi-Fi, 3G and LTE) and they even know the model numbers (SM-T800, SM-T801, SM-T805).

Before CES 2014, we heard several reports from Korea that Samsung is set to unveil AMOLED tablets at CES. Samsung ended up launching several new tablets at the event, but none with OLED displays. Now we hear fresh rumors from Korea that claim that the company will start producing 8" and 10.5" AMOLED panels in February, and they will hopefully unveil their new AMOLED tablets at the MWC 2014 event in March.

A few days ago Samsung electronics announced plans to start adopting OLEDs in more products - including in tablets. Samsung did launch an OLED tablet in 2011, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 with its 7.7" Super AMOLED Plus 1280x800 display. This was a premium small tablet and it was estimated that Samsung shipped only 500,000 of those OLED tablets.

Samsung reported their financial results for Q4 2013. Operating profit was lower than expected at $7.8 billion (compared to $8.3 billion in Q4 2012). Regarding OLEDs, Samsung says that total OLED shipments were actually down during the quarter, even though "new product sales increased".

Samsung however is expecting the OLED market to grow, as they plan to start adopting OLEDs in more products - including mid-range smartphones, tablets and wearable devices. The company will also launch "upgraded" flexible OLED panels in 2014.

We heard several reports from Korea that Samsung is set to unveil AMOLED tablets at CES. Samsung indeed release several new tablets at CES, but all of them use LCD displays. The main new family of tablets is the Galaxy Tab Pro, which comes in 12.2", 10.1" and 8.4" sizes - and all use 2560x1600 LCDs.

So far Samsung is disappointing us at CES - there's no new OLED products on display. Hopefully previous reports that the company is shifting its focus back to LCD to lower costs aren't true. We still know that SDC regards OLEDs as the future display for premium devices. Perhaps they are indeed shifting their OLED focus to flexible displays.

In January 7 CES 2014 will begin, and it'll be very interesting to see what kind of new OLED products and prototypes will be launched during this exciting event. Highlights from CES 2013 included LG's OLED TV launch, Samsung's YOUM flexible OLED launch and 4.99" FHD mobile OLED (which was later adopted in the GS4) - and finally Sony's and Panasonic's 56" 4K OLED prototypes.

But what should we expect from CES 2014? So first, let's look at OLED TVs. LG and Samsung are bound to show their current flat and curved 55" OLED TV products at CES, and LG will most likely bring their 77" curved UHD OLED prototype, but we do not expect them to launch this as a product yet. The two Korean companies are quite likely though to unveil ready-to-market 4K OLED TVs, curved and flat. Samsung already showed a 55" 4K OLED prototype at IFA 2013.

In a few weeks CES 2014 will begin, and this show always brings us many new OLED gadgets. New rumors from Korea suggest that Samsung is set to announce a new tablet at CES with a 10.5" AMOLED display. This follows reports from a few weeks ago from a different Korean site that claimed that Samsung is developing two new tablets that sport AMOLED displays - an 8" one and a 10" one.

So far the only OLED tablet by Samsung was the the 2011 Galaxy Tab 7.7 with its 7.7" Super AMOLED Plus 1280x800 display. According to ETNews, Samsung only sold 500,000 such devices (it was a premium tablet). But this time Samsung will be more aggressive and hopes to sell over 5 million of those new 10.5" tablets. If they manage to pull this off, this tablet wil be followed by 8" and 13" AMOLED tablets.

Samsung announced today that they shipped over 10 million Note 3 smartphones (or phablets, really). It took them a little over 2 months as the Note 3 was launched on September 25. Before they launched the phone, Samsung said that they shipped over 38 million Galaxy Note and Note 2 smartphones since launching the original Galaxy Note in 2011 and they quickly reached their target of 10 million Note 3 sales.

The Galaxy Note 3 has a 5.7" Full-HD Super AMOLED display (386 PPI). DisplayMate says that this is the best OLED display ever, and in fact it outperforms the best LCDs across the board. The Note 3 also has a 2.3 Quad-Core CPU (or a 1.9Ghz octa-core in some markets), 3 GB of RAM, 32/64GB of storage, a 13 MP camera (will be capable of 4K videos in some markets) and Android 4.3.