Zune Thoughts: Toshiba Gearing Up for Mass Production of 2.5' OLED Screens...a Year and a Half from Now

"Toshiba Matsushita Display is about to mass-produce OLED screens that could be used for a wide range of portable devices, according to a report from Japan's Nikkei BP. The joint venture between Toshiba and Matsushita (Panasonic) is claimed to be producing as many as one million 2.5-inch organic screens per month starting from Autumn of 2009 and would be the first Japanese company to do so. The development would be primarily targeted at cellphones, GPS navigators, and other handhelds, the newspaper says, though no specific products have been announced. The screen size is also commonly used for portable media players such as the iPod classic and Zune 80."

OLED is shaping up to be like most of those crazy-cool battery technologies that look so great in concept but never seem to go anywhere in real life. We've seen a few devices ship with tiny OLED screens, like the outer displays on mobile phones, but few devices using OLED screens as their primary display. We've been hearing the hype about the power savings of OLED screens for several years now, so why haven't they come to market? My guess is cost - no one ever talked about the costs of those 15" prototype screens we were seeing at CES 2008. There's no mention of screen resolution - one would hope they'd be VGA screens if they're 2.5" in size. QVGA would be a let down, even if the power savings would be substantial. And the article is wrong about the Zune 80, that device uses a 3.2" screen. Hopefully we'll see some OLED screens in that size as well.