The Galaxy S8 is the first in a new generation of OLED Smartphones. OLEDs have now evolved and emerged as the premium mobile Smartphone display technology. There is no better confirmation of this than a series of well founded rumors from a number of prominent publications that Apple will be switching its top-of-the-line iPhone model to an OLED display in 2017. More than two dozen manufacturers already make OLED Smartphones, and the new Full Screen Display design using a flexible OLED will be the new Flagship for all the upcoming future Top Tier Smartphones.
LCDs are a great cutting edge high performance display technology for Tablets to TVs, but for small handheld Smartphones, OLED displays provide a number of significant advantages over LCDs including: being much thinner, much lighter, without needing a bezel providing a rimless edge-to-edge design. They can be made flexible and into curved screens, plus they have a very fast response time, better viewing angles, and an always-on display mode. Many of the OLED performance advantages result from the fact that every single sub-pixel in an OLED display is independently directly electrically powered to emit light, so only the active image sub-pixels draw power based on their individual brightness levels. OLEDs can also provide better color accuracy, image contrast accuracy, and screen uniformity because of variations in the Backlights of LCDs.
As the result of their very versatile power management capabilities, OLEDs are not only more power efficient than LCDs for most image content, but they now deliver much higher peak Brightness than LCDs because the maximum power can delivered to just the sub-pixels that are needed for producing the current image. However, for mostly all white screen content LCDs are likely to remain brighter and more power efficient for a while.
OLED displays are also manufactured on flexible substrates that can bend, which allows the screens to be curved and rounded and provides a number of innovative new screen geometries. The most popular one is expanding the front main screen so that it extends around to both the right and left sides of the phone by bending around the corners like on the Galaxy S8, and on earlier Galaxy Edge and Galaxy Round models.
The main production and availability issue for the next several years will be that the demand for OLED displays will significantly exceed the manufacturing capacity
