Britain has officially opened their printable electronics technology centre (or PETEC). The center offers space and resources for companies to build mini production lines, and a place to develop and prototype applications.
Petec has 20 employees, and there are plans to grow to 40 by 2011.
DisplaySearch has released a new OLED lighting report recently, and now they give us some new information from the report. They predict that the OLED lighting market will take off in 2011. Revenues will surpass PMOLED display revenue in 2013 or 2014. By 2018 it will be a 6B$ market.
Here's a nice chart they published, showing the leading OLED lighting companies and their announced roadmap:
OLED-Info readers get a 5% discount on this report!
Universal Display Corporation announced their latest financial results. In the last quarter (4Q 2008) they had a net loss of 4.4M$, and 3.5m$ in revenue (which is actually their quarterly record).
In their conference call, they say "I would say substantially all of the active OLEDs that are in the market use our technology." - basically all displays by Samsung and LG. They also believe that we're gonna see many new products released in the second half of 2009, with larger OLED panels being introduced.
LG says they will increase their R&D investment by 25%. They seem to want to take advantage of the economic downturn to increase market share. They will invest over $2 Billion on 'future growth business' (also 25% increase from last year).
The new growth areas are Solar cells, Electric car batteries and AMOLEDs. This money might go to supply OLED panels to Apple according to some rumors...
Vodafone UK will release the Samsung Ulta-Touch S8300 (2.8" WQVGA touchscreen AMOLED) next week (March 19th). The phone is called Tocco Ultra Edition in the UK.
Samsung S8300 Ultra Touch
The S8300 is a 3G (USDPA/UMTA/EDGE/GPRS/GSM) slider phone with a 8Mp
camera with LED flash, DivX support (and many other formats), video
recording, A-GPS, FM radio and 80MB of internal memory with microSDHC
slot.
DisplaySearch has released a new report on OLED lighting. DisplaySearch discusses the most current
market forecasts and developments for the use of OLED technology in
lighting applications.
Find out how large the OLED lighting market will be and when will it
surpass the PMOLED display market. Contents in this comprehensive,
value-packed report include. More info can be found here.
There are new rumors that Apple are considering using OLED displays in an upcoming Netbook.
Apple are looking to enter the netbook market - using a touchscreen device, that may or may not have a keyboard (in which case it will be a high-end iPod touch). The main issue is obviously the price of the OLED panels. Apple are reportedly talking to Sony about using their OLED displays.
It seems like the old Apple OLED rumors will never die... In any case this new device is slated to be released towards the end of 2009 - so we've got some time to wait...
Sony has released the full spec of the 'X' series OLED walkman.
It will play MP3, WMA and AAC files (up to 320kbps). It supports videos in formats MPEG4, H.264 and WAV. Interestingly the screen itself is 432x240, but the video formats will only support 320x240. That's strange.
The player also has an FM radio, Wi-Fi (802.11g/b). Sony claims 33 hours of music playing and 9 hours of video watching.
We're still waiting for a US release or price (in the UK it will be released soon, costing 216GB for the 16GB version).
The Samsung Omnia HD is a great looking phone, with a HSDPA touchscreen 3.7" AMOLED (360x640). It has a 8mp camera, and can take HD videos.
Samsung i8910 HD phoneNow samsung wants 50 people to be Samsung ambassadors - get this phone before anyone else, and tell the world in your blog or videos. There are also some 'missions' that Samsung will ask you to do, and even invite you to their UK office.
You can send your entries by March 27th. I already sent mine ;-)
