Reviews - Page 5

Last month Huawei launched its P30 and P30 Pro smartphones (with a 6.1" 1080x2340 AMOLED on the P30 and a 6.47" 1080x2340 AMOLED on the P30 Pro). Reports from China suggested that Huawei adopted SDC AMOLED for the P30 and BOE-made panels on the P30 Pro.

According to Anandtech, who posted an extensive review of the P30 and P30, the supplier for the smaller 6.1" AMOLED on the P30 is indeed Samsung Display, but Huawei uses both LG Display and BOE as suppliesr for the large 6.47" AMOLED on the P30 Pro.

Only yesterday we reported that early reviews of the Galaxy Fold are very positive and that Samsung says there's overwhelming demand for the new foldable device - and today we have much less positive news.

At least 4 early Galaxy Fold reviewers report that only after one day of use, the screens on their devices broke. The Verge's Dieter Bohn says that a bump appeared on the crease of the phone, which quickly broke the screen - even though he did not perform any stress tests or anything - just normal phone use.

Samsung Electronics started to accept pre-orders for the Galaxy Fold a few days ago (April 14th) - and the company says it is already sold out due to "overwhelming demand" and it is no longer taking pre-orders

This is great news, especially as many questioned whether customers will be willing to pay $2,000 for a foldable smartphone. Of course Samsung's foldable OLED production capacity is limited so this demand may not be actually very high.

Google's 2017 Pixel 2 XL was one of the first phones to adopt LG Display's pOLEDs (6" 1440x2880) - and initial reviews of the display were rather dismal - as both reviewers and customers complained about bad color reproduction, graininess and problematic viewing angles. Many users also reported serious image retention issues.

In 2017, Google used Samsung's Super AMOLED displays in the smaller in 2017. This year, for the 2018 Google Pixel 3, Google chose SDC's 6.3" 1440x2960 Super AMOLED for the larger Pixel 3 XL - with proved to be a top-notch display. For the smaller Pixel 3, Google picked LG Display's 5.5" 1080x2160 - probably hoping that LGD managed to improve its displays - and most importantly its quality controls.

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.

A few days ago Huawei started shipping the Mate 20 Pro with its 6.39" 1440x3120 (538 PPI) AMOLED display made by BOE. The phone is only shipping in China at the moment, but some users are complaining about a green tint issue.

This seems to be a similar issue that happened on some of Apple's iPhone X OLED displays (which are produced by Samsung Display).

Display measurement experts Display Mate posted an in-depth review of the Google Pixel 3 XL 6.3" 1440x2960 AMOLED display. The display wins DisplayMate's highest ever Overall Display Assessment Grade of A+ together with a DisplayMate Best Smartphone Display Award.

DisplayMate says that Google now joins Apple and Samsung as the top tier of smartphone displays. The Google 3 XL display is on par with the AMOLED display used in Samsung's Galaxy S9. Interestingly, it turns out that Samsung Display provides this 6.3" AMOLED display to the Pixel 3 XL, while LG Display is likely to be the supplier for the smaller 5.5" 1080x2160 display used in the Pixel 3.

Apple recently launched its latest smartwatch - the Watch Series 4. It seems that at least some customers are complaining about a strong blue off-angle blue tint on the new OLED display. Some of these customers say that the tint is stronger compared to previous generation Watch devices - and also stronger than the tint on the iPhone X and LG OLED TVs.

It's not clear whether this is a real issue or not at this stage - we only have heard of a few customers complaining so far. But this is interesting as Apple has adopted its new LTPO backplane technology in the Watch 4, which could be responsible for the stronger tint (Is this the beginning of LTPO-gate?). All previous Watch devices used flexible AMOLED displays made by LG Display. We do not know yet whether LGD is still the exclusive supplier, or whether Apple added Samsung Display as its second source (or even exclusive).

DisplayMate has posted a comprehensive review of the Apple iPhone XS Max display - a 6.5" 1242x2688 AMOLED display. DisplayMate has found that this display is highly impressive - with a close to text-book perfect calibration and performance. The display has been found to be on par with the Galaxy S9 and Note 9 display.

The high performance display led us to ask DisplayMate's Raymond Soneira about the producer of this display - and he confirms our estimation - the iPhone XS Max's display was produced by Samsung Display. In the past months we have heard many reports claiming that Apple contracted LG Display to produce this 6.5" AMOLED, and now we have proof that eventually Apple chose to keep Samsung as its exclusive supplier for Smartphone AMOLEDs, at least for now.

Review web site Rtings.com has performed an extensive burn-in trial for LG's 2017 OLEDC7 OLED TV models, and reports that the TVs have shown signs of permanent image-retention, or burn-in after only 4,000 hours.

Rtings have used six OLED TVs, running them from January 2018 for 5 hours each day at a time followed by one hour when the TVs are turned off. This cycle was run 4 times a day. One TV was at maximum brightness, and the rest at only 200 nits. Some played CNN, some a gaming title (FIFA 2018) and some of the TVs played regular TV channels. The TV that played CNN had a clear logo and static bar burn-in images, and the same goes for the FIFA game (but only slightly). The regular TV programs did not suffer from any burn-in.