Hasta La Gadget!

Samsung is having a unique kind of contest, the company announced today, and it’s not the kind where someone walks away with a Galaxy S4. The Korean smartphone maker is asking people to submit ideas around what kind of devices to make with its flexible display technology. Have a hardware startup? Samsung wants you… to figure out what to do with their product.

Samsung is looking “to encourage designers, hardware engineers and entrepreneurs to begin thinking about future start-ups ideas using flexible display technology.” Winners are up for prizes that range from $2,500, to $5,000 and $10,000, for third, second and first place respectively, and the entries will be scored based on how important flexible displays are to the overall design, and how realistic and viable both the hardware and the business plan turn out to be.

Unfortunately, Samsung stipulates that teams won’t get any kind of firm details about when they might actually be able to get any prototype components should their idea be feasible enough to become real, nor will the company reveal anything around component pricing with regards to flexible displays to participating teams. Teams can create devices with displays ranging from 1-20 inches, with a max full-HD resolution of 1920×1080.

But if you are a hardware startup with a great idea you want to keep to yourself, and aren’t just looking to flex some design and engineering muscles in a semi-serious way, you might want to pay attention to this key bit of copy from the contest homepage:

Samsung is continuously innovating, and may develop information that is similar to materials submitted in this contest, so only non-confidential information should be submitted.

In other words, while this looks like an innocuous enough contest, it could actually be a way to crowdsource product ideas, or at least Samsung isn’t legally saying it isn’t that. But the company is likely more interested in encouraging potential supply customers and building a product pipeline for a new component than alienating hardware engineers and makers.

So as with virtually any contest asking for creative input, participate at your own risk, but hopefully this one will at least give us an idea what a future of consumer devices that use flexible displays could look like.

LG will begin mass producing flexible OLED displays for smartphones in Q4 2013, the company has confirmed, though while it has teased “major clients” it won’t confirm which manufacturers may offer handsets using the screen tech. LG Display expects to produce 12,000 sheets of flexible OLED every month, the company told The Korea Times, with

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You can’t blame us for rushing to see LG’s flexible OLED HD panel here at SID. First announced earlier this week, the 5-inch display sports a plastic construction, which allows it to be both bendable and unbreakable. Most alluring of all, though, is LG’s intimation that the screen tech will debut in a smartphone by the end of this year. Before we get lost in thoughts about a tricked-out Optimus G, let’s take a look at this early prototype.

The panel is made of plastic substrates, which are both more flexible and cheaper to manufacture than their glass counterparts. In fact, cost-effectiveness seems to be the chief objective overall. Clumsy consumers will benefit as well — in a smartphone, the glass above the screen could break, but the OLED panel would stay in tact, resulting in lower repair costs. At the company’s booth, a demo area let attendees take a hammer to the standalone display and twist it every which way — sure enough, it withstood these torture tests. In our hands, the 5-inch screen was lightweight and responsive to twists and bends; it felt like a thick film strip.

An LG rep told us the panel could sport a bigger or smaller size when it debuts in a smartphone later this year. And though the prototype on display here today was labeled merely as “HD,” we’re sure that resolution could be adjusted as well. For now, get an early look in our video after the break.

Filed under: Cellphones, Displays, LG

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Flexible displays are still a novelty at this point in time, as they have yet to be turned into a component in smartphones and tablets that are cost effective to warrant inclusion without causing the customers to balk at the final price tag. Still, it is nice to see companies continue to work on flexible display technology, and hopefully they will stumble upon a low cost yet effective approach sometime down the road. Both Toppan Printing Co Ltd and Plastic Logic Ltd recently showed off a prototype of flexible electronic paper (e-paper) that has a size which is equal to a 42-inch display, using it as a large-size digital sign at Retailtech Japan that happened earlier this month in Tokyo, Japan. This unique flexible e-paper was manufactured by using 16 pieces of 10.7-inch black-and-white e-paper, where the pixel count stood at a respectable 1,280 x 960.

In order to churn out a display device that is worthy of the e-paper, E Ink Holdings Inc’s electrophoretic front plane laminate was summoned to report for duty. As for the front plane laminate, it was driven by an organic TFT substrate which was manufactured at Plastic Logic’s Dresden Plant in Germany. Plastic Logic has long been working on flexible organic TFT substrates for the better part of the last six years, and they successfully established a volume production system a couple of years back, and has since been producing organic TFT-driven displays by using the 3.5th generation-size plastic substrate.

At the R&D facilities, a single piece of 10.7-inch e-paper was used per substrate, although at the manufacturing plant which saw the 3.5th generation-size plastic substrate being used, up to 9 pieces of 10.7-inch e-paper were obtained per substrate, and Plastic Logic figured out that the e-paper will eventually see action on subscreens of smartphones and tablets, as well as the digital signage industry. The ad industry would definitely take a huge leap forward with such e-papers being more affordable.

Source
[ Flexible electronic paper could be future of public advertising copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Samsung has had their fair share of coverage on flexible displays in the past, and this time around, it is no different. It is a good thing that we are not talking about mass production of flexible AMOLED displays being delayed, but rather, the BBC claims that Samsung is more than ready to begin shipping their first batch of devices to the market sometime before the first half of 2013 is over. In fact, Samsung intends to take the lead where flexible displays are concerned, with LG, Philips, Sharp, Sony and Nokia also working on their own versions of the flexible display. If flexible displays become wildly popular at the right kind of performance and price, we might also see Apple’s iPhone or some sort of Apple device take part in the flexible display madness, although it does not seem as though Cupertino would cozy up to Samsung for their supply.

What kind of application do you think flexible displays would do best in this day and age where consumer electronics are concerned? Perhaps a portable gaming console or a tablet for kids with a flexible display would be the next big thing in the market, who knows?

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