Wearable OLEDs - Introduction and Latest Industry News - Page 27

Engadget posted a review of samsung's Gear Fit smartwatch, with its flexible (curved) 1.84" (432x128) Super AMOLED display. And they really love that display - it's beautiful, the curve feels natural and it's aesthetically pleasing. The colors are vibrant - and the only problem is that it's barely readable in sunlight unless you set it to "outdoor brightness mode".

But eventually the reviewer is not happy with this hybrid smartwatch and fitness band, due to the weak software and awkward UI. And they say that the $199 price is too much for this device.

Back in February, Plastic Logic and Novaled (owned by Samsung) announced that throughout 2014 they will demonstrate truly flexible, plastic, full-organic AMOLED displays. The first demo in February was of a monochrome (red) display - and actually it was only shown on a presentation slide. But Plastic Logic promised us that they will show better prototypes as the year progresses.

True to their word, last week, at the Printed Electronics Europe event, plastic logic showed a monochrome 4" 360x128 (95 PPI) flexible AMOLED prototype. This time it was a real demo, as you can see from the photo above. This full-organic AMOLED panel uses Plastic Logic's flexible OTFT backplane and the whole panel can be bent and rolled and still show the image.

AUO announced that they developed a new 5.7" WQHD (2560x1440, 513 PPI) AMOLED panel. The panel is ultra slim at 0.57 mm and it uses special driver design to increase touch sensitivity and as a result can support 10 touch points.

AUO says that this is the world's highest resolution AMOLED. Actually we know that Sharp, and SEL developed a 13.3" 8K CAAC-OS OLED that achieves 664 PPI - but this one hasn't been unveiled yet (it will be shown at SID 2014 in a couple of months). In addition Samsung Display announced a while back that they are developing a 5.2" WQHD panel which will have a pixel density of 560 PPI. Reportedly SDC is also planning to make a UHD panel that will have a PPI of 860 (!).

Samsung's Gear Fit is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com for $199. The smart wearable fitness band will ship on April 11th. The Gear Fit uses a flexible (curved) 1.84" (432x128) Super AMOLED display.

The Gear Fit is currently #7 in Amazon's Cell Phone Accessory Kits best selling list. Most of the items in this list cost 2 or 3 dollars, so it may mean that the Galaxy Fit has already been ordered by many people (I'm not sure how popular are those items really int hat list).

Last month Huawei unveiled their TalkBand B1 smart wearable device. It was reported that the display is a 1.4" white flexible (curved) OLED. It wasn't clear who the maker of this display was, and whether it is actually flexible.

Now Huawei posted the full specification of the TalkBand, and it turns out that the display is indeed a curved OLED. It is a 1.4" 128x16 PMOLED panel made by Futaba. This is Futaba's film OLED, and it's probably the first device to use those curved (flexible) panels. Towards the end of 2013, Futaba indeed said they finished development of those panels. In any case, Huawei reveals that the panel is only 0.3 mm thick and it weighs only 1 gram.

A few days ago Motorola unveiled an upcoming smart watch called the Moto 360. This device (which uses Google's new Android Wear OS) is, in my opinion, the first good looking smart watch or wearable device.

Now there are reports that the Moto 360 uses an OLED display. This makes a lot of sense. This will be an always-on watch, and at least according to photos, the default analog-watch display will be mostly black. So an OLED will be much more efficient than an LCD.

Yesterday Samsung announced their 2nd flexible OLED device, the Gear Fit smart fitness band. The display is a curved flexible OLED - 1.84", 432x128 Super AMOLED. This seems to be the most advanced display on a fitness band, as most others opt for PMOLED panels.

The Gear Fit includes four fitness monitors (pedometer, exercise, heart rate, and sleep) enabled by three sensors (accelerometer, gyro and hear rate) and can also show mobile phone notifications (messages, e-mails, calls, etc.). Personally this seems to be a much more attractive device than Samsung's own Gear smart watches. It's great to see Samsung adopting flexible OLEDs in more devices, that actually benefit from a thin, light and curved display.

Update: just after posting my article, Samsung annonced the Gear Fit, a fitness band with a 1.84" Super AMOLED panel. Perhaps my reasoning was all wrong, and high-resolution, color displays may take over this new market as well.

Passive Matrix OLEDs (PMOLEDs) use a simple driver, which restricts the resolution and efficiency of the display, but also enables it to be produced easily and relatively on the cheap. The first OLED displays on the market (in 1998) were PMOLED, made by Pioneer, used in car audio systems.

The PMOLED market grew in the past, up until 2006. Back then, the main application for those displays was the sub-display on clamshell phones. But then Apple launched the iPhone, and since then the clamshell design lost its popularity very quickly - and the PMOLED market is in decline ever since.

Bloomberg reports that HTC is developing three new wearable devices. The company will demonstrate the first one at the MWC event later this week, but will only show the watch privately to mobile carriers. The first watch will be based on Qualcomm's Toq device - which uses a small touch Mirasol display.

The second watch wil be based on Google's Now service, and this one will use an AMOLED display. The third wearable device will be an electronic bracelet. That's all we currently know. According to Bloomberg the information comes from a person with "direct knowledge of the plans".

Update: It turns out that Plastic Logic didn't actually demonstrate the flexible OLED prototype. They did show a presentation, in which they revealed that the current first-gen prototype is monochrome (red) and quite simple. They do intend to keep producing new demonstrators throughout 2014.

Novaled (owned by Samsung) and Plastic Logic announced that during 2014 they will demonstrate truly flexible, plastic, full-organic AMOLED displays. The first-gen display was demonstrated at the FlexTech conference in Phoenix last week. Plastic Logic hopes that the technology will be ready for adoption by display makers towards the end of 2014.

The two companies say that this is the first time an all-plastic AMOLED produced in a low-temperature manufacturing process is demonstrated. The display uses Novaled's PIN OLED materials and Plastic Logic's OTFT backplane. The display also used organic materials from Merck (probably the emitters).