Samsung: OLED notebooks by late 2010
Global computing boss targets release a year from now — Samsung says we could get the first commercial OLED laptops a year from now. — Speaking at the official IFA launch of the X-Series and N-Series notebooks and netbooks, Kyu Uhm …
Context & Ripple Effects
At IFA 2009, Samsung used the official launch of its X-Series and N-Series notebooks and netbooks to put a public deadline on OLED portables: global computing boss Kyu Uhm says the first commercial OLED laptops could reach market by late 2010. The claim matters because OLED in laptops has so far been demo-hardware territory, and a named executive committing to a ship window turns it into a competitive race.
The announcement fits a busy stretch for Samsung: within weeks of IFA the company confirmed its own mobile application store for bite-sized apps, opened the Mobile Innovator portal for TouchWiz widget developers, and confirmed a smartphone built on NVIDIA's Tegra processor — a pattern of staking out platform and component leadership ahead of rivals.
First-order effects
- Kyu Uhm makes Samsung the first major PC maker to attach a public ship date to commercial OLED notebooks, handing the company a shot at the 'world's first' marketing position if late 2010 holds.
- Rival notebook vendors now have a visible deadline to match or beat, either by accelerating their own OLED programs or ceding the premium-display claim to Samsung.
Second-order effects
- Panel suppliers would need to scale OLED manufacturing down the cost curve and across laptop-sized panels, since notebook volumes dwarf anything OLED has shipped in before.
- A working OLED laptop line creates a two-tier pricing structure for Samsung itself: OLED as the flagship differentiator above the volume-priced N-Series netbooks running standard panels.
Third-order effects
- If the late-2010 date holds, display technology replaces raw specs as the battleground in a portable PC market otherwise converging on near-identical netbook hardware.
- A successful laptop-scale OLED launch would mark OLED's climb up the size ladder from small screens to mainstream computing, pressuring the whole industry's panel roadmap rather than one product category.
The trend: Display panels are becoming the differentiator in portable computing as OLED migrates up the size ladder from handhelds toward laptops, with vendor ship-date commitments setting the pace of adoption.