AMOLED

If you deemed the nearly 20 million smartphones Samsung shipped in the June quarter an impressive figure, brace yourself for even more extraordinary achievement in the second half of 2011 as DigiTimes reports that Samsung “has placed orders for 30 million touch sensors used to make four-inch AMOLED screens”. Suppliers Chunghwa Picture Tubes and others are said to be the prime beneficiaries of Samsung’s booming smartphone business. Of course, Samsung sources touch sensors from other suppliers so their final order may well exceed the quoted figure. As evident in the below chart from Asymco’s Horace Dediu, the Korean company’s been growing at an exponential rate, eclipsing Apple’s 142 percent annual growth in iPhone shipments.

The company, however, all but displaced Apple, which just toppled Nokia to become the world’s leading smartphone vendor. Being the leading Android backer, Samsung’s success has helped the Google operating system reach more than 50 percent platform share of all smartphones, more than double the iOS share of 19 percent, per latest Canalys survey. That said, it’s entirely plausible that this year Samsung could overtake Apple and become both the world’s leading smartphone vendor, while Apple remains the industry’s leading player in terms of revenues and profit. Also notable, a  gap between Samsung and market leader Nokia is narrowing fast…

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwEVV7PMn10]

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.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=788MeU_msMI]

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