AMOLED displays to differentiate 2011 Android superphones from Apple’s iPhone

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Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode, or AMOLED, is a display technology from Samsung which has so far been limited to their high-end devices such as the Galaxy S series smartphones. It has worked out well for the Korean firm: They’ve been advertising the crispness and sharpness AMOLED enables as the hardware feature setting apart their smartphones from Apple’s iPhone 4 which employs a regular LCD display with in-plane switching (IPS) technology. Even though iPhone 4’s Retina Display-marketed LCD IPS display sports wide viewing angles and crisp 960-by-480 pixel resolution, it falls behind the AMOLED technology which features vivid colors, true blacks, high brightness and low power consumption.

All those wonderful goodies are said to be adopted by “numerous mobile phone vendors” in the second half of this year, reports DigiTimes. The publication explains that Samsung Mobile Display “has began production of AMOLED panels with the 5.5G production lines in May to further increase the penetration of AMOLED panels”. Samsung and its carrier partners have been making a lot of noise with the Super AMOLED Plus display featured on the Galaxy S II smartphone.

For example, the company aired a series of television commercials focused on the Super AMOLED Plus display alone. The Korean Herald asserted in May that Apple might use AMOLED in iPad 3, but it’s unclear why Samsung would enable its rival to tap the one distinct hardware feature that differentiate their products from Apple’s gadgets.
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Samsung has always had high hopes for the technology. AMOLED project CEO Ho-moon Kang said in January of 2009 that AMOLED business will “seize the worldwide display market,” which didn’t happen due to high costs of production, which is not being addressed with the new manufacturing lines and a greater production output. In addition, the company’s display operations have been struggling lately. The Wall Street Journal reported of the difficulties in Samsung’s flat-panel display unit. The company consolidated operations in response to the losses, merging component and manufacturing operations. Some watchers, however, warn that Samsung simply wants to hide losses of their display business among the lucrative semiconductor operations.