Universal Display announced that they have been awarded a new Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I $99,900 program from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). During this program, the Company will study the potential to enhance the performance of white PHOLED lighting devices in order to meet DOE requirements for general illumination applications.

Under a program titled Thermal Management of High-Efficacy White Phosphorescent Organic Light Emitting Devices, Universal Display will design and build white PHOLED lighting panels to evaluate the impact of operating temperature on performance.

Liquidware (an open-source electronics firm) has released a kit that can be used to make a linux tablet with a 4.3" (480x272) OLED touch display. The kit includes a BeagelBoard Rev C4 board (with a 720Mhz ARM Cortex-A8 OMAP CPU), 20mm speaker, SD slot (it comes with a 4GB card), Wi-Fi, mini USB port and a battery.

So you won't get a real tablet - it's very thick, and not very pretty - but you can play videos and access the web. And it costs just $393. Here's a short video on the kit:

Samsung say that the Galaxy Beam will launch on July, in Singapore (a European and Asian launch will follow soon afterwards). The Galaxy Beam has a 3.7" Super-AMOLED, WVGA DLP pico-projector, Android v2.1, Wi-Fi, 8mp camera, A-GPS, FM radio and HD video recording.

Samsung Beam

Update: This phone is now official, and called the Epic 4G.

There are reports that Samsung is working on a new WiMAX phone, the Galaxy-S Pro. The "original" Galaxy-S has a Super-AMOLED display, so we can assume that this one has the same display.

Update: A Samsung Executive (J.K. Shin, president of Samsung's mobile communications division) has confirmed that Samsung are working on a table, to be called Galaxy Tab, to be released no later than 3Q 2010.

We have some fresh rumors about Samsung's upcoming Tablet: according to a Vietnamese site, it will be named Galaxy Tape (and not tab), and indeed come with a 7" Super-AMOLED. Other features include a 1.2Ghz A8 processor, Android 2.2, 16GB of internal memory and a microSD slot. It'll weigh 370 grams. Galaxy Tape sounds weird to me, but if these are the true specs, this is one exciting gadget...

Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab

Last month we reported that the HTC Incredible is not available - because of component shortages, specifically the Samsung-made AMOLED display (a 3.7" 480x800 WVGA panel). Now we hear that it won't ship until July 12th at the earliest.

HTC Incredible

Samsung announced that they can't meet customer demand in their OLED plant - and they won't be able to do so until next year at least. Recently they commited $2.2 billion for new AMOLED production lines, to go online in 2012.

Here's an interesting comparison, a Pixel-Qi transflective LCD technology (with a touch layer) against the Google Nexus-One AMOLED display. The Pixel-Qi behaves much better than the AMOLED display... It'll be interesting to see how it compares to the new Super-AMOLED displays.

When Apple announced the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs said that the IPS-LCD display (which they call a "retina display") is better than an AMOLED. Now Samsung replies, saying that the display is nice, but AMOLED is better. Samsung says that the iPhone sharpness (960x640) has only a 3-5% advantage over the Galaxy-S's Super-AMOLED (800x480), but it draws 30% more power. Samsung also believes that AMOLED provides better viewing angles and contrast. Samsung concludes by saying that "structurally, IPS LCD technology cannot catch up with AM-OLED display technology".

We have some more information and a nice video about AUO's 2.4" transparent touch AMOLED display. The resolution of the panel is 240x320, and it's a "dual-emission" structure. It's got 45% transparency, 200 cd/m2 brightness on the bottom, and 100 cd/m² on the top. The contrast is better than 20,000:1. The response time is less than 0.01ms. AUO hopes to have this as an actual product in 2011, and are also working on a 7" version.

The Holst Center has developed and produced a new flexible OLED that will be used on the back-side of a racecar rear-view mirror. This the first application of a "flexible OLED on foil", according to Holst. They have used Holst's encapsulation technology and Araldite composite materials of Huntsman Advanced Materials. In fact the OLED itself displays the logo Araldite. The OLED is a white "signage device" - it cannot change the display, and the logo is constructed by patterned deposition of light emitting polymer.

The car is the ORECA01 car from French racing team Oreca and they will will be using the mirror in the 24 hours Le Mans race (June 12-13). 12 hour of this race is in the dark, and people will be able to see the writing...