LG’s POLED display points to devices right around the corner

Monday, November 10, 2014

LG’s POLED display points to devices right around the corner

With LG finally releasing the LG G Watch R and adding to the choices for a round faced Android Wear device, buyers will also get some more new technology from LG. For the display, LG used Plastic OLED, or POLED, a technology that the company sees as very important to the future development of electronic devices. LG recently added a new page on their web site explaining some of the benefits of the technology and dropping some hints about how they see it being used in the coming years.

The main change that LG shares about POLED is the material and the switch from the traditional glass OLED. The plastic material developed by LG is capable of withstanding high temperatures while maintaining chemical stability when being used as a display. Through the use of plastic, the display can achieve some level of flexibility and curving. The manufacturing process also results in the elimination of bubbles and foreign substances with the POLED’s layers.

POLED has some other benefits as well. Displays can be produced that have very thin bezels, they are much thinner than current OLED or LCD displays, and they are more stable over time due to the encapsulation of OLED elements in the plastic. Being made of plastic instead of glass, POLEDs are much less susceptible to breakage.

One of the benefits that may not be apparent for a while though has to do with the ability of the new material to bend, fold and otherwise be curved to different shapes. LG hints that we could see some devices on the market as soon as next year and for a few years thereafter that make use of POLEDs for things like smartwatches that curve around the entire wrist, foldable displays in smartphones, and maybe even a large display that can be rolled up into a tube. It is hard to tell whether LG’s roadmap for POLEDs represents some outside-of-the-box wishful thinking or the potential for actual products, but it should be exciting to see how they develop uses for the technology.