Wearable OLEDs - Introduction and Latest Industry News - Page 21

Three new wearable devices with OLED displays were unveiled at the MWC tradeshow today. The most interesting one is Huawei's Watch - an Android Wear device that sports a 1.4" 400x400 (286 PPI) circular AMOLED display. It features a heart rate monitor and fitness tracking, six-axis motion sensor and a barometric sensor. Huawei's Watch will ship "in the middle of 2015".

Another interesting device is HTC's Grip - a fitness tracker that was developed together with Under Armour. The wearable device sports a curved monochrome (white) PMOLED display, which seems to be Futaba's 1.4" 128x16 film OLED (similar to the one used in Garmin's Vivosmart). The Grip includes the usual range of sensors in addition to an internal GPS chip.The Grip will ship in the US in the spring for $199.

Last month Apple said that they will ship the Apple Watch in April 2015. Today Apple announced that they are hosting a press event on March 9th - with the message on the invite saying "spring forward". It's highly likely that during this event Apple will officially launch their first wearable device, and hopefully provide all the technical details about the display.

Hopefully Apple will finally unveil the actual display type used in the Watch. In the-launch event they said it uses a "flexible Retina display", which can mean anything. According to several trusted sources, the Watch uses a flexible OLED display.

Panasonic has unveiled a new VR headset prototype during a private demonstration in Japan. The device, which is similar to Oculus' VR headset uses a large AMOLED display that realizes large field of view (viewing angle of 90-degrees) and a fast refresh rate of up to 75 fps.

Panasonic says that the prototype, unlike Oculus Rift's product, can be hooked on the ears like regular glasses (Oculus' headset uses a strap). The company did not disclose any information regarding the commercialization of the new headset.

According to Canalys, 4.6 million wearable bands were shipped in 2014. Out of those, 720,000 were Google-powered (mostly Android Wear). Canalys says that the Moto 360 was the clear leader of the Android Wear devices, and LG's G Watch R (with its round flexible OLED display) was more popular than LG's previous square watch.

While Android Wear's numbers aren't stellar, other smartwatch platforms aren't very successful either. Canalys says that Pebble sold a million devices since its launch and Samsung is also "struggling to keep consumers engaged".

Apple's CEO Tim Cook announced that the company aims to ship their first wearable, the Apple Watch, in April 2015. Officially Apple said that the phone uses a "flexible Retina display", which doesn't really tell us anything regarding the technology, but according to several trusted sources, the Watch uses a flexible OLED display.

It's highly likely that the flexible OLED supplier is LG Display. This has been reported months ago. We reported that Apple may be interested in signing a deal with SDC too for the same flexible OLEDs, but apparently that did not happen.

Garmin's Vivosmart is the second device (after Huawai's TalkBand) to use Futaba's flexible (conformable) PMOLED displays. We're happy to post this hands-on review of one of the first flexible OLED devices on the market...

The Garmin Vivosmart

Garmin defines the Vivosmart as an "activity tracker plus smart notifications", which is really to say "an almost-smartwatch fitness band". Which it is. The Vivosmart is indeed a fitness band that can display steps, calories, distance and all the other fitness staples. On top of that, it can also perform basic smartwatch tasks like receive vibration alerts for phone calls, text messages and emails. How well does it do all those things? We'll get to that.

Wearable devices are adopting flexible and transparent OLEDs. OLED panels allow for new possibilities for this growing market: light weight, power efficiency, thin form factor and new design options. Don't miss our new article covering the OLED wearable market!

Sony announced a new single-lens attachable OLED-based display module for eyewear applications - which can turn any glasses into Google-Glass like smart devices. Sony aims to mass produce this display module in 2015, and will offer it to a wide variety of customers - eyewear makers, electronics makers and enterprise device developers.

In this concept device, Sony adopted their new 0.23" 640x400 (nHD+) OLED microdisplay unveiled in June 2014. Sony says that the OLED display enabled the module to be compact and light. The OLED is coupled with a micro-optical unit optimized for the OLED display. The projected image's diagonal angle of view converts to 13 degrees, which is equivalent to the field of view for a 16-inch display 2 meters in the distance.

Last month we reported that China's Everdisplay (EDO) started mass producing 5" 720p AMOLED displays with a capacity of 600,000 panels per month. EDO presented in a trade show in China, and showed their near-future AMOLED roadmap:

We already knew that EDO aims to start making 5.6" FHD panels in February 2015 and smaller 1.63" 320x320 ones in Q2 2015, but according to the new roadmap, there are some more panels underway. First up will be a circular 1.35" panel for smartwatches, and it will also be released in Q2 2015. Further down the road EDO plans a 6" WQHD (2560x1440 489 PPI) and a 5" FHD panel.

Amazon now lists LG's G Watch R, the circular Android Wear smartwatch with the flexible OLED display. The G Watch R costs $299 and is now shipping - and can be a great gift for the holiday season.

The G Watch R uses a 1.3" 320x320 (246 PPI) plastic-OLED panel, a 1.2 Ghz Snapdragon 400 CPU, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage. It has a 410 mAh battery which should last about a single day.