Blue OLED efficiency up 25%

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OLED technology may be about to take a massive leap forwards, which is good news for anyone looking to the screens becoming more widely used. The blue OLED has always been the weak link in the screens, offering significantly shorter lifespans than its red and green brethren. Well, a team from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is one step closer to cracking the problem by improving blue efficiency by an impressive 25%.

Samsung Lucido, smartphone specs in a midrange phone

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This is a sign of progress. Lucido is unashamedly not a high-end phone, but it’s got the kind of features and specs that we’re normally fairly impressed with. Are we in the future or something? I don’t feel different…

There’s HSDPA, aGPS, a 5-megapixel camera with various software goodies like face recognition and smile capture, Bluetooth, an accelerometer, and microSD slot. Best of all, though, is the AMOLED display, which stretches out across 2.2″ of the front of the phone.

The phone measures 114 x 56 x 12mm, and there’s a nice metallic finish to it that you can see in the pictures above. It’ll be available April, but there’s been no price announced yet. Looks rather swish, don’t you think?

(via Trusted Reviews)

Sony's Ericsson's super-garish S001 8megapixel Cyber-shot mobile – with OLED screen

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Black, pink, green, gold, with squared-off silver buttons? It would appear that “bling” culture is alive and well in Japan, where Sony Ericsson has revealed its latest OTT camera-slash-phone-slash-TV-slash-media-player-slash-ladies-fashion-accessory hybrid mobile conversation piece.

Boasting a decent eight megapixel Cyber-shot-branded camera, the S001 slider features a TV tuner because the Japanese are totally into watching TV on their mobiles, Bluetooth, a GPS receiver and the screen is a whopper – a 3″ OLED…

OLED Christmas tree, OLED Christmas tree, how lovely are your branches


Headline with bad pun – check. Novelty gadget – check. Silly video – check. Energy efficiency – check. This is tech blog gold! It’s an OLED Christmas tree, created by the lovely chaps (and they seem to be exclusively chaps) who work at the GE OLED labs.

This video hurt me. Hurt me because now I know that the people who I’m counting on to build me an affordable OLED TV are spending their time making Christmas trees, rather than solving the problem of how to make OLED displays very cheap. Damn their eyes!

GE OLED (via Crunchgear)

Related posts: Technology Deathmatch: LCD vs Plasma vs OLED – TV Take Down | Samsung stretches out its OLED display technology to a whole 40 inches

Porsche Design P'9522 mobile phone launches

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This is the Porsche P’9522 – a mobile phone designed by Porsche. I can hear you already thinking ‘it’s got an expensive name on it – the features are going to be practically non-existent’. Well, tell your thoughts that they’re wrong, and should shut up – it’s actually surprisingly high-specced.

The phone case is milled from a single solid aluminum block and a single sheet of scratchproof glass! It’s got a 2.8″ touchscreen OLED display! It’s got built-in Wi-Fi and GPS! It’s got a fingerprint scanner! A fingerprint scanner, for god’s sake!

The bad news? You’re not going to get this in the Carphone Warehouse or Phones 4 U. It’s being sold in Porsche shops and ‘exclusive specialist stores’ only. There’s no price quoted, but we’ll have to assume it’s going to be more than its predecessor, the fliptastic P’9521, which costs €1200 (just over £1000).

Porsche Design

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Samsung develops foldable mobile phone with big OLED screen

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Samsung has been playing around with flexible displays for several years, as has Sony, but now Samsung has developed a working prototype of a mobile phone which uses a foldable OLED screen to enable a much larger display to be fitted into a handheld device.

Take a look at the device when it’s closed and it looks like a fairly standard handset with a general-purpose display on the front. Unfold it (as shown in the video below) and you have access to a much larger screen for playing movies and games.

The advantage of using flexible material is that you end up with a seamless display rather than two separate ones. I could see this being expanded to create even larger displays that can be folded away into a sensibly-sized mobile phone handset, or perhaps built in to other portable devices such as netbooks and DVD players…

Vuzix announces widescreen virtual reality glasses

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Following on from the VR920s, which I reviewed earlier in the year, Vuzix has just announced a pair of widescreen multimedia glasses – the AV310. Like the others, they sit on your nose, and position two dinky screens in front of your eyes, so it’s like having a massive screen further away. They’ve also announced an upgrade to the AV230XL – their entry level goggles – which upgrades them to OLED displays.

The AV310 is the first commercially available video headset available in widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. It ships with a cable for connecting to your iPod or iPhone, as well as a variety of other devices with TV-Out functionality, including many recent MP3 players. The OLED displays on the AV230XL – and I got to see these myself – look phenomenal. Far brighter and more responsive than LCD displays. Very impressive.

Sansa rolls out 8GB version of its tiny 'Clip' MP3 player

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I’m rather a fan of Sansa’s tiny ‘Clip’ range of MP3 players. Although their album-on-a-microSD-card concept is idiotic, their MP3 players are very good, and the miniscule Sansa Clip, with a (relatively) massive clip on the back, is one of the best. Good news then – Sansa has just launched an even bigger version, taking the size up to 8GB.

The player supports your regular MP3, WMA and WAV files, and it’ll work happily with music from most DRMed subscription services. It comes with a built-in microphone, and FM radio, and features a dinky-but-very-bright OLED screen. It only weighs 0.9 ounces. If you’re dying to get your hands on one then you can – for just £45. It’s a decent player, with a decent capacity, for a decent price. You can’t go wrong with that.

Sansa

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Samsung stretches out its OLED display technology to a whole 40 inches

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The OLED tech war is raging in the laboratories of companies across the planet right now, and here’s what Samsung’s boffins have managed to come up with – a 40″ OLED TV.

Massively superior to its past OLED test developments, this latest model features a stunning contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 – and manages to pull off the full HD spec 1920×1080 resolution, or 1080p to give it its common name. It’s pretty much a finished OLED telly, although Samsung has not revealed any launch date plans…

Sony working on "Annihilation Assisted Upconversion" – bendable OLED screens

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OLED development race winner Sony has announced its plans to start making OLEDs less than 1mm thick – that are flexible enough to be bent and wrapped around angles.

This’ll come in handy for when you need to… bend a screen. Or, these thin, semi-transparent OLEDs could be piled on top of each other to make 3D displays, used as HUDs in the windscreens of expensive cars, or even used as a way for Sony to carry on charging us lots of money for new TVs that aren’t particularly different from our existing TVs…