IF / News

Battery

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo now claims that all 3 new Apple iPhones in 2017 will feature wireless charging. He expects the rumored iPhone 8 with an OLED display and glass casing to have a new 3D Touch module with “additional graphite sheet lamination” in order to prevent the device from malfunctioning due to overheating. (GSM Arena, Mac Rumors, Apple Insider, CN Beta)

WiTricity, the industry pioneer in wireless power transfer over distance, announced it is collaborating with Nissan, the leading manufacturer of electric vehicles (EVs), to drive adoption of wireless EV charging systems. (CN Beta, Business Wire, SlashGear)

Connectivity

Nokia is buying Comptel, a company that specializes in building software-based data communications solutions for mobile carriers. Nokia’s offer is to pay EUR3.04 in cash for each share, valuing Comptel at EUR347M (USD370M). (TechCrunch, Nokia, OfWeek, Leiphone)

Smartphones

Including export sales, China-based smartphone makers shipped a total of 181.8M smartphones in 4Q16, up 4.4% on quarter, 12.8% on year, according to Digitimes Research. Vendors’ efforts to push sales overseas were affected partially by India government’s move to replace old banknotes with new ones, as vendors saw their combined overseas shipments increase only 4.7% on quarter and 4.1% on year to 80M units in 4Q16. (Digitimes, press, CNMO, Huanqiu, 163)

According to IHS Technology, Huawei shipped 139M units smartphone in 2016, becoming the top Chinese smartphone vendors. OPPO follows with 95M units shipped. (Laoyaoba, Sohu)

HMD Global is manufacturing Nokia-branded smartphones in Vietnam. The documentation of Nokia 150 clearly states that the phone has been manufactured in a factory called ‘Microsoft Mobile (Vietnam) LLC.’ (Android Headlines, GSM Arena)

Touch Display

The flat-panel display (FPD) industry is in the midst of a historic wave of building new factories to manufacture AMOLED displays. This will drive USD9.5B worth of AMOLED-specific production equipment purchases in 2017, according to IHS Markit. The equipment used for producing TFT backplanes will account for 47% of the total market in 2017, worth USD4.4B in revenues. Organic light-emitting layer deposition and encapsulation tools will generate record revenues of USD2.2B and USD1.2B, respectively, in 2017. (IHS Markit, press)

TFT-LCD panel maker Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) has disclosed it shipped 22.52M small- to medium-size applications in Jan 2017, decreasing 24.6% on month and 23.1% on year. It also shipped 157K large-size units in the month, increasing 28.0% sequentially and 17.0% on year. (Digitimes, press, CNFOL)

Panel maker HannStar Display shipped 35.63M small- to medium-size panels and 61K large-size units and own-brand LCD monitors in Jan 2017, dropping 19.7% and 47.3% respectively on month. (Digitimes, press)

Shipments of large-size panels (10” and above) for LCD TV, monitor, notebook and other applications were around 8.48M units in Jan 2017, down by 13.2% from Dec 2016, AUO disclosed. As for small- to medium-size applications, the shipments exceeded 11.94M units, down by 5.3% on month, the company added. (Digitimes, press, TechNews)

Innolux shipped 25.98M TFT-LCD panels in Jan 2017, consisting of 8.12M large-size units, decreasing 20.0% on month, and 17.86M small- to medium-size units, slipping 22.4%. (Digitimes, press, TechNews)

Camera

Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has unveiled new material that works on a spectrum of colors from blue to green, opening up potential applications in spectroscopy, sensing and imaging. The materials are ultra-thin. (Android Authority, Engadget, Harvard)

Tokyo University and Sony publish a vision imager demo presented at ISSCC 2017. A 1000fps target recognition and target tracking were demonstrated by using the new vision chip with 3D-stacked 140GOPS column-parallel SIMD processing elements. (Laoyaoba, Image Sensors World)

Panasonic announced that it has developed a new technology, electrical control of the near infrared (NIR) light sensitivity of the same pixel in an organic CMOS image sensor. The sensitivity of all the pixels in the image sensor, which has directly stacked organic films, is simultaneously controlled by changing the applied voltage to the organic films. (Engadget, Business Wire)

Battery

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo now claims that all 3 new Apple iPhones in 2017 will feature wireless charging. He expects the rumored iPhone 8 with an OLED display and glass casing to have a new 3D Touch module with “additional graphite sheet lamination” in order to prevent the device from malfunctioning due to overheating. (GSM Arena, Mac Rumors, Apple Insider, CN Beta)

WiTricity, the industry pioneer in wireless power transfer over distance, announced it is collaborating with Nissan, the leading manufacturer of electric vehicles (EVs), to drive adoption of wireless EV charging systems. (CN Beta, Business Wire, SlashGear)

Connectivity

Nokia is buying Comptel, a company that specializes in building software-based data communications solutions for mobile carriers. Nokia’s offer is to pay EUR3.04 in cash for each share, valuing Comptel at EUR347M (USD370M). (TechCrunch, Nokia, OfWeek, Leiphone)

Smartphones

Including export sales, China-based smartphone makers shipped a total of 181.8M smartphones in 4Q16, up 4.4% on quarter, 12.8% on year, according to Digitimes Research. Vendors’ efforts to push sales overseas were affected partially by India government’s move to replace old banknotes with new ones, as vendors saw their combined overseas shipments increase only 4.7% on quarter and 4.1% on year to 80M units in 4Q16. (Digitimes, press, CNMO, Huanqiu, 163)

According to IHS Technology, Huawei shipped 139M units smartphone in 2016, becoming the top Chinese smartphone vendors. OPPO follows with 95M units shipped. (Laoyaoba, Sohu)

HMD Global is manufacturing Nokia-branded smartphones in Vietnam. The documentation of Nokia 150 clearly states that the phone has been manufactured in a factory called ‘Microsoft Mobile (Vietnam) LLC.’ (Android Headlines, GSM Arena)