OLED Smartphones - introduction and industry news - Page 17

Kolon Industries says that the company is supplying colorless polyimide (CPI) films to Xiaomi - used as cover windows for Xiaomi's latest Mi Mix Fold smartphone. Xiaomi sold over 40,000 such smartphones within one minute, and the company hopes to ship around 500,000 units in total.

Kolon says it is the only company that produces such CPI films, and the company says it also supplied films for Huawei's Mate X, Motorola's Razr and Lenovo's Thinkpad X1 foldable laptop - and will also supply to Oppo and Vivo for their own foldable devices.

Xiaomi's VP (and Redmi manager) Lu Weibing posted an interesting poll at its Weibo account. Weibing asked Xiaomi users whether they prefer an AMOLED or LCD display.

Out of around 20,000 respondents, over 14,000 chose AMOLED as the preferred display type. Last year he posted a similar poll - but then most users preferred an LCD display. LCD advocates say that they prefer LCD if drove by DC dimming, rather than the PWM used in most AMOLEDs. It is actually also possible to use DC Dimming with OLED displays.

Trusted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that Apple is developing its first foldable smartphone, planning to release it in 2023. The company plans to sell up to 20 million units in the first year of production.

The Apple foldable smartphone's current design uses a 8-inch 3200x1800 display. Samsung Display is expected to be the exclusive supplier of this high-end display.

According to a report from Korea, Samsung Display started producing OLED display modules at its new plant in India's Noida city Uttar Pradesh state.

The modules that will be produced at Noida will be supplied to Samsung Electronics, to be used in smartphones sold in India.

At the end of last month, Xiaomi introduced its first foldable OLED device, the Mi Mix Fold smartphone, with a main 8.01-inch HDR10+ 1860x2480 AMOLED display that folds inwardly, and an external 6.52-inch 90Hz HDR10+ 840x2520 AMOLED display.

The Mi Mix Fold is now shipping in China, starting at around $1,500. According to Xiaomi, it has sold around 40,000 units in the first minute - generating over $61 million in revenue for the smartphone maker.

Chinese smartphone producer TCL unveiled an interesting new smartphone prototype (concept?) called the Fold ‘n’ Roll.

As you can see in the video, the device has a 6.87-inch OLED display when fully folded. It can open up (out-folding) into a 8.85-inch display, and then it can open even further to a 10-inch tablet-like device using a rolling mechanism. The display itself is produced by TCL's CSoT subsidiary.

LG Electronics announced that it will close its mobile phone business unit. LG has lost around $4.5 billion in its smartphone business over the past five years, as competition, especially from China, is strong. LG's global smartphone market share is around 2% and the company did not manage to find a buyer for its money-losing unit.

In the past few years LG aimed to focus on high-end phones with new designs, especially the Explorer series of next-generation phone designs and technologies. The first Explorer phone was the LG Wing, a unique smartphone that sports dual displays in a swivel revolving display design. The Wing sports a main 6.8-inch 2460x1080 flexible LGD P-OLED display and another 3.9-inch 1240x1080 G-OLED (LG's rigid OLED brand) display.

Samsung Display has been developing polarizer-free AMOLED displays for many years, and last year UBI detailed how the company plans to use color filters to eliminate the need for polarizers and so increase the efficiency of their OLED panels while also lowering the thickness.

DSCC posted an interested article that details Samsung's upcoming polarizer-free OLEDs, which it brands as POL-LESS OLEDs. The first OLEDs to adopt this new structure are expected to be adopted in Samsung's Galaxy Fold 3 later this year.

In 2020 it was reported that Samsung Electronics is set to use AMOLED displays produced by China's BOE in some of its smartphones. It was later reported that BOE failed to pass Samsung's quality tests.

According to a new report from Korea, BOE finally managed to pass Samsung's tests and is set to start supplying flexible OLEDs that will be used in Samsung's budget Galaxy M series of smartphones.

In past years Apple had to pay millions of dollars to Samsung Display as a compensation for lower smartphone OLED orders. Apple is committed to buy a certain amount of displays, and this payment is a fine due to lower orders.

Due to lower OLED orders in 2021, analysts estimate that Apple, again, will have to compensate Samsung. The main fault is with lower sales of Apple's iPhone 12 mini. In total, according to reports, Apple reduced its OLED Orders for the iPhone 12 series by 20% to 75 million units in the first half of 2021.