Synaptics has a new 'experimental' phone called the Fuse. You can interact with the phone by squeezing, gripping, flexing and tilting the phone. The device melds multiple technologies such as multi-touch capacitive sensing, haptic feedback and proximity sensing. This is just a prototype that will not be made into a product. Synaptics just wanted a showcase for their technologies.

A couple of days ago we reported that PolyPhotonix are showing a new dress made out of OLEDs, following a story by photonics.com. It seems that this is not true. That dress was already exhibited in 2005, back before PolyPhotonix was even founded... It's also not using OLED displays, but rather EL displays, made by Elumin8.

It seems that PolyPhotonix are still not producing any OLED panels, although they are working towards a pilot line.

I want to thank the anonymous commenter on the original post for this update.

There are reports that Google are planning to release a new phone soon. It will run Android OS 2.1, it will be very fast, thinner then the iPhone, with no keyboard and two microphones. The display will be a "super high-resolution OLED touchscreen. Google will only sell the phone unlocked.

Some Google employees around the world are already testing this new phone...

UPDATE: it turns out that this is not an OLED dress at all! It is using EL panels, made by Elumin8 back in 2005. Here's more information...

UK's PolyPhotonix is showing an 'OLED Dress', designed by Gareth Pugh. The dress was exhibited at the launch of the UK's "Plastic Electronics Strategy' (the $32 million investment in plastic-electronics announced in July). The UK announced that by September 2010, they will begin prototype production of flexible OLED Lighting panels and low-cost long-life solar cells.

PolyPhotonix OLED dress

PolyPhotonix are working toward polymer-based OLED Lighting panels. Their first production line is already active (that's where they made the OLED panels for the dress).

In an interesting article by the Financial Times, both Idemitsu Kosan and Sumitomo executives estimate that "2012 will be the year when OLEDs hits the big times".

Idemitsu Kosan also says that they are working on a new way to 'spray' small-molecule OLED materials. The new method should be ready by 2015. Spraying OLEDs (instead of using vapor-deposition) will mean less material loss, and thus cheaper displays. It will also make it easier to fabricate large panels.

GE and Israel's Power Paper will jointly-develop self-powered (battery) OLED Lighting. The project will combine Power Paper's paper-thin, flexible batteries with GE's OLEDs.

GE says that the new OLED products will cost less, be more effective and will be reliable and shock-resistant.

Intertech Pira says that the OLED market (for both displays and lighting) will reach $6.7 billion in 2014. That's a compound annual growth rate of 44 percent over five years. They say that OLED Displays will account for about $4.7 billion out of that, growing at a CAGR of 35%. OLED Lighting will grow more quickly (112% CAGR) to almost $2 billion in 2014 from, well, nothing today.

Amulet Technologies has released a new universal TFT/OLED display driver, the GEMexpress. The new driver is highly-integrated (six-layer PCBA) measuring 1.5"x3.0" and includes the display controller, a touch-panel decoder, and ARM7 processor and Amulet's Graphical-OS-In-Silicon which manages the user-interface for the display.  

Amulet say that this new display driver can save a lot of time because it can interface to 'virtually any display type'. More information over at their site.

WSJ reports that Apple will soon begin production of their tablet, and will release it at late March or April 2010. The display will be a 10.1" LCD - they say that there will not be an OLED display after all. But these are still just rumors, nothing official yet...

Update: new reports say that the Galaxy 2 will have a smaller 3.7" WVGA AMOLED.

There are rumors that Samsung will soon update their Galaxy Android phone. The new version (Galaxy 2, or Saturn I6500) will have a large 4.1" AMOLED display.