In February 2012 ASUS unveiled the Padfone - an Android smartphone with a tablet docking station. The display of the phone was a 4.3" qHD (800x600) Super AMOLED. Yesterday ASUS unveiled the Padfone 2 - and this time the phone uses a 4.7" 720p IPS+ LCD panel. The LCD is made by Sharp and uses their IGZO backplane.

AUO is suing two former executives that allegedly stole technologies (including AMOLED related ones) from the company and supplied it China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT, a subsidiary of TCL). The Taiwanese Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau (MJIB) said that the investigation is nearly over and the findings will be passed over to prosecutors soon.

AUO says that the executives were compensated with annual salaries of over $1 million in exchange for the technology. Taiwan wants to become a major supplier of OLED panels and considers this leak very sensitive.

Back in September 2010 Astron Fiamm has created a new really cool car concept called Car.Bones that uses OLED lighting: headlights, inside-lighting, turn indicators, and more. Today we learned that the company unveiled the second generation concept (Car.Bones 2012, with improved light output and design) at the the automotive salon in Paris. The company is in "advanced discussions" with several automotive manufacturers and suppliers to commercialize those technologies.

Astron Fiamm says that the OLED ensemble fulfills potentially all the exigencies of the European norm (ECE) for automotive exterior signal lighting. Each of the individual OLED panels can be addressed and animation can be created. 

Fraunhofer's COMEDD and POG Präzisionsoptik Gera have co-developed OLED structures coated in the range of micrometers at opaque or transparent glass substrates. This technology can be used in complex optical and opto-electronical systems in a range of applications (medical, laser, aerospace, telescopes, microscopes and even sports optics). Basically these are transparent optical devices with self-emitting figures, points or lines;

The best technology used today to achieve the same effect uses prisms. The advantage the new design is that the active luminous area is integrated directly into the glass substrate which results in a better field of view, and the whole system is much more simple - and hopefully will result in cheaper designs.

Carl Zeiss has been showing their Cinemizer OLED head-mounted-display product for ages (since 2008 in fact), and finally they started shipping: $749 in the US and £577.90 in the UK. This is the 850x500 model (not the 720p version shown in 2010) that has HDMI (v1.4), Apple (iPhone 3/4 and iPod touch) connectors and A/V inputs.

$749 is quite expensive, considering that Sony's HMZ-T1 HMD costs only $50 more, and offer a much higher resolution at 1280x720.

Sharp announced a new mobile phone - the first one with an IGZO Oxide-TFT backplane. The Aquos Zeta SH-02E, bound for NTT DoCoMo will have a 4.9" 1280x720 display. Other features include a quad-core 1.5Ghz CPU, Android 4.0, LTE and NFC. The phone will start shipping before the end of 2012.

Back in April 2012, Sharp announced that they have begun to produce Oxide-TFT based LCDs at their Kameyama Plant #2 - and now indeed we see the first product to use the new technology. Sharp says that these displays will have smaller TFTs and thus increased pixel transparency - which leads to lower power consumption.

Samsung's two flagship mobile phones, the Galaxy S3 and the Note 2 both have 1280x720 HD Super AMOLED displays, but they are quite different: the S3 uses a Pentile sub-pixel architecture while the Note 2 has a unique RGB matrix. AndroidAuthority posted an interesting article comparing these two displays from a user point of view.

The conclusion? Both displays are excellent, and most users would never tell the difference. The Note 2 doesn't suffer from the Pentile pattern (which is only really visible when you magnify the images) or the the slight greenish or bluish cast of the S3. They have a good suggestion - simply spend a few minutes with both devices and decide for yourself.

A couple of days ago we reported about Futaba's 3.5" (256x64) flexible PMOLED prototype shown at CEATEC 2012 in Japan. It turns out that Futaba also demonstrated a smaller one at 1.3" (128x128). Bother are very thin at 0.22 mm. here's a nice video showing these prototypes and some more OLED displays from Futaba:

Back in June 2012 I reported from SID on Ignis' Max Life technology. Max Life provides external compensation - that deals with OLED burn-in. The idea is to keep track of how much each pixel was used, and so it's possible to calculate the brightness loss in that particular pixel, and then drive this particular pixel correctly - to compensate. Ignis now released a nice video showing a 20" AMOLED panel (their own a-Si prototypes made by RiTDisplay) with a burn-in logo. When Max Life is turned on, the logo disappears:

Ignis explains that while Max Life theoretically makes the "eventual" lifetime (until the display burns out completely) worse, in practice it helps to make the device usable longer. Ignis says that the main problem is non-uniformity in brightness and not actual brightness.

The South China University of Technology (SCUT) unveiled some new AMOLED technologies: a 5" transparent AMOLED panel, an Oxide-TFT based OLED and an integrated touch AMOLED panel.

SCUT is collaborating with Guangzhou New Vision Optoelectronic and together established a small production line that can already produce these kinds of displays (5-inch to 7-inch in size) in small volume.