Google's Nexus-S phone was supposed to launch on the 20th of December in the UK, but Carphone Warehouse actually had some phones in stock yesterday (for £549.95). They quickly went our of stock though. In the US, the phone will ship on December 16th.

Google's Nexus-S is made by Samsung and is based around the new Android v2.3 'Gingerbread' OS. It has a 4" Super-AMOLED 'Contour display' (which means that the glass is curved, it's not a flexible OLED).

Update: Toshiba denies the rumors about Apple's investment in the new plant

Toshiba Mobile Display plans to invest around $1.2 billion in a new LCD factory that will make small-sized LTPS LCD displays. Apple will invest some of the money too - this factory will mostly make "Retina" displays for iPhones. The production will start on the 2nd half of 2011.

Apple IPS-LCD vs Super-AMOLED

This is interesting, and probably means that Apple isn't looking to use OLED displays in their products any time soon. I guess earlier rumors of Apple buying all of Samsung's Super-AMOLED capacity for 2011 isn't true...

Professor Ei-ichi Negishi, winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry has been appointed an executive research advisor to Sony in the field of organic electronics. Sony hopes to stimulate its organic electronics researchers and accelerate R&D processes.

Organic electronics technologies being researched by Sony today include OLEDs and flexible OLEDs, dye solar cells, vegetable-based plastics and more.

This is an interesting story: a group of 6th-graders from Tucson, Arizona have developed an automated IV drop counter. This $1.5 device can help medical personal avoid errors (under-dosing or overdosing) - and is much cheaper than an infusion pump which costs $5000.

The kids used an OLED display on their device, and have requested a patent on the design.

Air Products announced that they have been selected to supply gaseous nitrogen, oxygen and argon to Samsung Mobile Display's (SMD) upcoming Gen-5.5 AMOLED plant plant in Tanjeong, Korea. Air Products will build a new air separation unit (ASU) and pipeline at its Tanjeong site for gases supply to SMD. Air Products is also supplying gases to SMD's two TFT-LCD plants in Cheonan.

Samsung 5.5-Gen AMOLED plant is scheduled to start production in July 2011. This should increase Samsung's AMOLED panel capacity tenfold...

Google has released the new Android v2.3 (Gingerbread). One of the updates is a new user interface (UI) - which seems to use more blacks. There are reports that this is so intentionally to take advantage of AMOLED displays (who consume no power on black pixels).

Google Nexus-S

This is not really surprising. It seems that AMOLED is slowly taking over the high-end smartphone market (and Google themselves chose an AMOLED for the Nexus-S phone. Or at least in some versions). Come July 2011, when Samsung's new Gen-5.5 plant (with 10X the capacity of their current plant) begins to produce AMOLEDs - and we're sure to see much more Android phones with AMOLEDs.

Researchers from the UK and Switzerland have shown that a magnetically polarized current can be manipulated by electric fields. This is the first time that it was shown how you can proactively control spin with electric fields and could pave the way towards combining memory and processing power on the same chip.

The interesting part is that this discovery has been made with flexible organic semiconductors, and so could offer a step-change in the power efficiency and weight of devices based on such materials, including of course OLED displays.

Google announced that the Nexus S will be available in Russia in February 2011 - but with an LCD (super-clear LCD) instead of a Super-AMOLED. It's likely that they are doing this because of the shortage in AMOLED displays. Google will probably use Super-AMOLED in some countries (like the US) and LCD in others.

Both displays offer pretty much the same performance, but it seems that Super-AMOLED is still the display of choice for Samsung.

Remember Samsung's beautiful flexible AMOLED display shown at FPD-2010 a few weeks ago? Samsung claims that they will commercialize this technology by 2013-2014, apparently to create 'rollable TVs'. Here's Kim Seong-Cheol, a senior manager over at SMD showing the 0.2mm thick display (although they say they can make 0.1mm thick ones):

Samsung are also working on touch-enabled paper-like displays that will be used for newspapers, and will be commercialized by 2015 (not sure if that's an OLED or an e-paper) and also on transparent displays.

Google has officially announced the Nexus-S (the successor to the Nexus-One). This Android v2.3 (Gingerbread) phone is made by Samsung and has a 4" Super-AMOLED contour display - which means that the glass is curved, this is not a flexible OLED. Other features include triband HSPA, 5mp camera, NFC, 16GB of on-board storage, a gyroscope and a 1Ghz Cortex A8 processor. Check out this photo showing the curved display:

The Nexus S will be available on December 16th in the US. It'll cost $199 with a T-Mobile contract or $529 unlocked. Check out this nice video from Google introducing the phone: