Several reports from Korea suggests that LG Electronics is getting ready to announce their first phone that uses a flexible plastic-based curved OLED panel. Both reports say the new phone will sport a large 6" panel and it will be announced soon - within days or in November at the latest.

One thing the two sources do not agree upon is the name. CNet says it will be called the G Flex while ZDnet Korea claims it will be called the LG G Z or Z1. CNet says that they obtained the sketch shown above the shows how the new phone will look like.

Back in December 2012, rumors started to circulate about an upcoming Apple smartwatch called the iWatch. At first it was reported that Apple will use a 1.5" touch PMOLED made by RitDisplay. Later on in 2013 it was reported that Apple will use 1.5" PMOLEDs produced by Foxconn. Today Korea's Chosun Ilbo claims that Apple decided to use a plastic flexible OLED panel.

Apple 2011 flexible OLED watch patent

According to the reports, Apple is developing three models, with 1.3", 1.4" and 1.5" displays. They already produced a prototype 1.5" device. Chosun is quoting "industry sources" in their short article.

Corning recently announced the new second-gen Lotus XT high-performance glass suitable for OLED displays. The company has been supplying glass substrate and cover glass for OLED displays for years now. Now Corning was kind enough to participate in a Q&A session here on OLED-Info to better explain how they see the OLED market and what the future holds for Corning and OLEDs.

We talked to two Corning executives. John Bayne is Corning's High Performance Displays VP and General Manager, while Harrison Smookler is the commercial director and program manager of Willow Glass Substrates (flexible glass).

IHS says that they expect flexible OLED sales to reach $21.9 million in 2013 and grow quickly to almost $100 million in 2014. The flexible OLED market will continue growing at a very fast rate as it will reach almost $4 billion by 2018 and almost $12 billion by 2020.

This is a very aggressive forecast. IHS says that they expect flexible OLEDs to bring about an "unprecedented change in flat displays". Those displays will make an "innovative change in the conventional display industry structure once commercialized". The first products will be plastic-based OLEDs which are thin and durable. Rollable and foldable OLEDs are forecasted to be introduced after 2016.

AU Optronics announced today that it will show new 4.3" flexible AMOLED panels at the Touch Taiwan 2013 conference next week (August 28-30). The new flexible panels are thinner than AUO's previous prototypes at 0.2 mm (vs 0.3 mm before). This is far thinner than LGD's thinnest LCD display announced last week (1.21 mm). AUO's panels use a plastic substrate and thin film encapsulation.

AUO flexible OLED prototype (2011)

AUO will only showcase the company's 5" Full-HD AMOLED panels unveiled earlier in 2013. These panels features the world's highest resolution density at 443 ppi. The company will also show new panels which are 5" 720p (i.e. lower resolution than the FHD ones but at the same size). AUO refers to these as HD720 AMOLED.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo developed a highly-flexible OLED lighting device that can work even after being completely bent and crumpled. They hope that this device can be used for medical and healthcare sensors.

The flexible panel uses a metal electrode (LiF/Al), a transparent PEDOT:PSS transparent electrode and a polymer substrate. The minimum bending radius is 10 micrometer and the brightness of the panel is 100 cd/m².

Two days ago we reported on new rumors from Korea saying that Samsung will have to use IPS-LCD displays in about 10% of the Note 3 phones due to expected AMOLED production shortages. Today MT Media (a Korean publication) posted an "Exclusive" article in which they say that Samsung will in fact use a plastic-based unbreakable 5.99" YOUM OLED display in the Note 3.

YOUM phone prototype, CES 2013

This coincides with the OLED Association claim back in April that the Note 3 phone will use a YOUM display. Samsung's YOUM capacity (especially for these relatively large 5.99" panels) will be quite limited at first, but it seems that Samsung really has to innovate in their new phones. The GS4 is a great phone with a terrific display, but it isn't really innovative in hardware or design (and some suggest that sales aren't as good as Samsung hoped for).

In February 2013 LG Chem unveiled their flexible OLED lighting panels, with plans to start producing them in July 2013 (they now aim to do so in September 2013, a slight delay). Those panels use a thin-glass substrate and a metal protective layer with LG Chem's Face-Seal encapsulation.

Today LG Chem announced that they developed new plastic-based (transparent polyimide) OLED lighting panels (shown in the photos above and below). These panels are more bendable (see photo above) than the current metal/glass ones, and LG Chem refers to them as "Plastic Film type Truly-Flexible OLED Panels". The company aims to mass produce these new panels in H1 2015. The new panels are even lighter than the current ones (which are only 0.33 mm thick and weigh under 8 grams).

LG Display says they expect to start mass producing flexible OLEDs in Q4 2013 and supply them to "major clients". One of these clients is LG Electronics who want to produce the first flexible-OLED phone by the end of 2013.

LGD says that they already completed the development of those displays. As far as we know LG's flexible panels uses polyimide coated substrate and direct-emission RGB sub-pixels (as opposed to LG's OLED TV which use an WRGB technology - white OLEDs with color filters). The first panels won't actually be flexible, but they may be curved. They will also be lighter, thinner and much more durable compared to glass-based OLEDs.

E Ink announced that it will begin to produce 13.3" 1200x1600 plastic-based flexible E Ink panels (called Mobius) in 2013. Those Mobius panels weigh just 60 grams and will be much more rugged compared to the company's glass based panels. The panels use Sony's flexible TFT technologies (that were transferred to E Ink for the production).

Sony already unveiled a prototype tablet that will uses those displays. This tablet is aimed towards the educational market and Sony hopes to launch it by March 2014. The prototype device uses a touch display (with stylus support), 4GB of memory (with microSD) and Wi-Fi. The whole device is just 6.8 mm thick and weighs just 385 grams.