Big Surprise

The iPhone 6 does not us sapphire. Apparently Ray Soneira, agrees with me; this is from his DisplayMate website, "The use of sapphire to make the iPhone screens scratch proof was one of the most talked about rumors over past year as a result of Apple’s $578M investment with GT Advanced Technologies to build a factory in Arizona. The likelihood of sapphire appearing on the iPhone 6 was close to zero because it will probably take at least another year for everything to come together. It is important to note that sapphire has some downsides over and above its much higher cost and manufacturing complexity. The most important issue for display performance is that sapphire has almost double the screen Reflectance of glass (due to principles of optics), so it will be harder to read sapphire screens in high ambient light. That might be one reason why the recently announced Apple Watch Sport edition has a cover glass rather than sapphire like the other models – because it is much more likely to be used unshielded in high ambient light outdoors. Another reason is that while sapphire is very hard it is also brittle and is likely more prone to impact breakage, which is more common in sports situations. So, if given the choice, I personally would choose a cover glass with its better screen visibility and breakage protection. Others may find the scratch protection more important."

There is commonly confusion over display specifications. Many people do not understand the difference between color gamut and color resolution. And it is understandable that a non technical person might not understand the difference between hardness and toughness or the difference between an isotropic glass and an anisotropic transparent crystal. However, a display being fundamentally an optical device, when the discussion turns to a new material in the optical chain, it is amazing that the new material's optical performance could be so widely ignored. In GTAT's promotional literature, they did publish its "index of refraction", for all to see (... that particular page seems to have been removed from the web site. "Oops!.. Sorry about that. The page you requested cannot be found.") However the format of the publishing indicated that "more is better" even though a higher index is exponentially more surface reflection. In "More is Better, " I detail the problems mobile displays have with surface reflections; how that is the limiting factor on current mobile LCD performance. The amazing hype regarding sapphire leading up to the iPhone 6 announcement just goes to prove that no one actually reads specs.

Update 10/8/14 GTAT filed for chapter 11 on 10/6/14 The stock is now selling below $2 and had been as high as over $20. Its market cap is now just under $240 Million.

Smart Watch Formats

In the Sep 20, 2009 edition of “Touch Panel,” in an article that I published titled, “The case for a flexible touch panel keyboard” I made this statement regarding mobile devices at that time, “This limitation in screen information content has produced a number of “unbalanced” designs where the computing power of the device addresses too few pixels to adequately support the intended functions of the device.” Of course that statement was shortly followed, in June of 2010, with Apple’s retina display where they effectively pushed pixel density to the limit. It has subsequently been followed by numerous large phone designs where screen sizes have grown from 3.5” to well over 5” with the actual screen now constituting almost the entire front of the device rather than 70%. And makers continue to add to the pixel density even though the retina display theoretically started already at the resolution limit of the human eye. Full HD resolution is now available giving 2 megapixels, about 13.5 times the number of pixels as the Apple 3G. Given this journey of the past few years, mobile device makers may be planning to start over, not with low resolution displays but with smaller displays in a watch format with the consequent reduction in pixel count proportional to the reduction in screen area.

Some time ago one of my cousins described a technique for flight simulator displays where the direction the pilot was looking was monitored. The center of his field of view was generated in high resolution while things in the pilot’s peripheral were generated in much lower resolution. An observer watching the pilot in the simulator could clearly see the high and low resolution areas of the screen. However, to the pilot, it appeared that the entire screen was in high resolution. This technique was adopted to maximize the use of limited computing power in rendering an image for the pilot. Although a smart watch may not have the same computing power limitations, it would seem that the screen area limitations could be addressed by a similar technique.

The current generation of motion sensors is very small and very precise. They could be used to create virtual screen area to compensate for very small screens. This is standard in “near to eye” applications but could also be useful on a wrist mounted device. But there is no real substitute for just using a larger display. The first wrist watches were pocket watches with a wrist band. They kept pretty-much the same size although they were eventually engineered to be much thinner. Given their single function, there was never much of a point to making them bigger. That is not the case with a smart watch. A large cylindrical display with the virtual screen area enhancement would have interesting 3D effects as well.

Flat is Out?

Samsung has announced a new curved OLED TV. This follows the LG curved OLED. After 40 years of development to get a flat TV screen, after years more development to get that flat screen ever thinner, is the industry now headed the other way? Not Quite.

The industry has several problems that it is dealing with simultaneously that makes curved screen OLED TV an enticing idea. First and foremost, in conjunction with recent depressed economic times, the fiz has gone out of the TV market. The industry has attempted to rectify this by pushing a number of features, in many cases pushing performance of the features well beyond what most human beings can see. Though specs do sell TV sets and they certainly are a means to premium pricing, specs that can easily be seen and be demonstrated by retail floor personnel have a much better chance at growing the market. One of the big advantages of HDTV was that it was a demarcation between the old and the new. The difference between an HDTV set and an older NTSC set could be seen, even when the set was off. A curved screen recreates this.

A second issue that the industry is dealing with is the growth of "over the top" (OTT)viewing of TV and video content on mobile devices. Very high resolution small screens with very high quality sound compete for consumer attention and the consumer dollar. Though video viewing on notebook computers has been around for a while, OTT is now offering a much more immersive experience. Unlike 3D, driven by the film makers and mostly used to push the content out, the curved screen draws you in. It creates an experience that is much harder to replicate in a mobile device.

A third issue is that the industry would really like to commercialize OLED. LCDs are great but they need multi-billion dollar fabs. Long term, OLEDs could have some cost advantage but they will never get to the long term until they start generating returns to scale, getting prices down by getting volume up. Competing with LCDs by doing things such as being a little bit better on some aspects probably won't do. It is not saving Plasma. So, the best way to grow OLED use is to make a product that can not be made with an LCD. That is how LCD did it. Absent the notebook computer and the volumes it generated, which can not be made with a CRT, we would still have CRT TV. Though there is an alternate pathway for OLED doing mobile devices, any large size TV volume certainly does not hurt.

Absent new form factors that actually require a flexible display (Scroll down to "Red Planet"), curved displays will be OLED's forte.

Exhaustive Research

I have two teenage daughters (actually not, one is 12, one is 20) that find it hard to agree on anything. However, they did both agree on their absolute need for iPhones. They have both had their iPhones for 2-3 years and both now want to update their phones... both to Samsung Galaxies. I can't say if this is just an eb and flow of what happens to be hot at any particular time, if Apple is losing some of its mojo, or this is just some random defection by two previously dedicated Apple device owners. Taken together with recent press, it does seem that the smart phone market is much more up for grabs than it was.