OLED devices - Page 2

A couple of days ago we reported on rumors that Sony will soon unveil the next generation PS Vita which will sport a 6.3" AMOLED display. This isn't confirmed yet, but Sony did lower the price of the current PS Vita. The Wi-Fi model now ships for $199 (down from $249) while the 3G model is $249 (down from $299).

Sony PS Vita

The PS Vita features a 5" touch OLED display (960x544, Samsung made, apparently with green PHOLED), a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 processor and a quad-core PowerVR (SGX543MP4+) GPU (Sony says that it is as powerful as a PS3), Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and optional 3G. Gaming controls include dual analog sticks, motion controls and a multi-touch pad on the rear side.

Emopulse, a new California based company, embarked on a very ambitious project - to build a smart watch that uses two flexible OLED displays. The company hopes to raise $300,000 using crowd funding to develop this watch. The 128GB model will cost $480.

The watch uses two flexible OLED displays. The company's founder claims they are in discussions with two flexible OLED makers - which probably means Samsung and LG. He says that both makers guaranteed panel delivery by the end of 2013.

Back in December 2012 we posted a new Apple OLED rumor - about the iWatch: a bluetooth smart watch that has a 1.5" touch PMOLED, apparently made by RitDisplay. In February 2013 the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both posted about this rumor.

Today these rumors resurfaced. This time Taiwan's Economic Times reported that Apple had made some prototypes with a 1.8" PMOLED, but decided they were too large. Now they are testing 1.5" PMOLEDs, and have ordered a thousand units from Foxconn - for internal experimentation.

Update: we've got some new details on those new OLED panels from sony

Sony has some interesting news for us at NAB 2013. First up are new 4K OLED monitor prototypes (30" 4096x2160 and 56" 3840x2160). And the good news is that Sony actually plans to release the 30" ones in 2014.

Sony also updated their TRIMASTER EL professional OLED monitors with the new A Series. These new monitors use an improved panel that has a wider viewing angle and reduced color shift (by half, compared to previous models). The new series includes the BVM-E250A/BVM-E170A cinema/broadcast monitors, the BVM-F250A/BVM-F170A TV production and broadcasting monitors and the PVM-2541A/PVM-1741A picture monitors.

Sony announced a new DLSR, the A58. This new mid-range camera sports a newly-developed 20mp sensor, new lock-on focus mode and auto-object framing mode. The EVF uses an SVGA (800x600) OLED microdisplay. The back display uses Sony's new Triluminos Quantum-Dots enhanced LCD (the first time this display is used in a consumer product, expect Sony's newest TVs). We just spotted the A58 on Amazon.co.uk - and it will launch on April 19 2013 in the UK for £500.

That SVGA OLED microdisplay is interesting. Sony themselves released 0.5" XGA (1024x768) and 0.7" 1280x720 OLED microdisplays back in August 2011 (they are using the XGA ones in several DSLRs, such as the A99 and the A65), and they never mentioned an SVGA one. We do know that both eMagin and Olightek are making SVGA microdisplays however.

Blackberry announced their first BB10 devices today, the Z10 and Q10. The latter is Blackberry's first keyboard BB10 device - and the company's first OLED product, too. It sports a square 3.2" 720x720 (330 ppi) Super AMOLED display, LTE, 1.5Ghz dual-core CPU and 2GB of RAM. We still do not know the Q10 release date or price.

Last year in June we reported on rumors that suggested that the new QWERTY BB10 device will indeed sport such an OLED display. It was also reported that the non-keyboard device will have a 4.65" AMOLED but this is not true (the Z10 has a 4.2" 1280 x 768 356ppi LCD).

Toshiba has unveiled a (rather large and bulky) Bluetooth watch prototype called the Computer Graphics watch. It sports a 320x100 OLED panel (probably a PMOLED), an ARM processor and a Electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor. The idea is that this watch can sync to your smartphone for notifications and all sorts of applications (such as a heart-rate monitor which of course uses the ECG).

This isn't a new idea. Sony is offering a similar Android accessory called the SmartWatch (which also uses a PMOLED display, by the way, although at 1.3"). Sony's SmartWatch costs $109. The first-gen Sony LiveView, by the way, is now down to only $22.

Back in November 2012 Samsung announced that they sold over 5 million Galaxy Note II phones worldwide in less than 3 months, and now we hear that the company sold over one million Note II phones in South Korea alone. Samsung is on track to sell 10 million units by the end of Q1 2013, just four or five months since launching the phone in September 2012. This is a great success for Samsung.

The Note II has a 5.5" HD Super AMOLED display (1280x720, non-Pentile), a quad-core 1.6Ghz processor and a large 3,100mAh battery. It's only 9.4mm thick. It's available for AT&T ($250), and also unlocked in the US for $775 (international version).

Apple OLED rumors never die. This time these are rather different rumors. According to a Chinese tech blog, Apple and Intel are jointly developing a bluetooth smart watch. This new iWatch (or whatever they'll call it) will have a 1.5" touch PMOLED, apparently made by RitDisplay.

I'm usually quite skeptic on Apple AMOLED rumors, because there's still not enough AMOLED capacity to be used in iPhone or iPod devices. But ramping up PMOLED capacity shouldn't' be a problem for RiTDisplay (which used to have larger capacity than today, but they shut down some lines due to financial problems). Anyway, if this is true, it's great news for my friends over at RiTDisplay.

Macy's just announced a new sweater (designed by Sean John) that includes an embedded OLED video tag on the sleeve. This seems to be the same tag made by Recom for their own video-tag products (a 2.8" 320x240 display) - back in 2009. It includes 2Gb of memory and can play back images and videos (the battery will last for 6-10 hours). The more I think about wearable displays, the less I like them, but if you like getting this kind of attention, maybe it's for you.

The sweater will soon be available at Macy's, we do not know the price yet.