Samsung is considering large investments in microLED mass production

Samsung is considering making large investments in microLED panel production in the first half of next year, according to industry insiders cited by ETNews. Component suppliers are reportedly waiting for Samsung’s final decision regarding the production size of microLED panels, which may come shortly after CES 2020.

Some industry watchers are positive that Samsung will push microLED into mass production next year, as the company has reportedly improved its expertise on this emerging display technology to the point where it would be possible to mass-produce plenty of microLED panels to meet the relatively high demand.

One component supplier who’s hoping to benefit from Samsung’s microLED endeavor said ‘there is a good chance that Samsung Electronics will carry out its investment next year.’

Other industry watchers are not so confident

While some investors and suppliers believe that Samsung will likely make a large investment in microLED mass production early next year, other industry watchers are not as positive.

An unnamed display industry expert cited by the Korean publication believes that production costs are still very high for microLED components, so even if Samsung has the knowledge and resources to pull this of, pushing microLED panels into mass production next year would still not be profitable enough.

‘Just as there have been rumors about mass-production of microLEDs last year and this year, chance that there will be a change next year is low‘ said the source.

There’s no arguing that Samsung’s microLED-based The Wall costs a literal fortune. The series comprising The Wall Luxury and The Wall Pro was released in India a couple of weeks ago for the starting price of a whopping $490,000, or nearly half a million USD. Unless the company manages to bring prices a whole lot lower than that, the customer base will remain fairly small, and mass production probably wouldn’t be necessary given the relatively low demand.

All in all, Samsung is planning some interesting TV-related reveals at CES 2020, and perhaps the recent reports are accurate in saying that the company will decide whether it’s worth pushing microLED panels into mass production in the first half of the year. We’ll keep you posted.

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Samsung to make chips for China’s Baidu in notable first partnership

Samsung makes chips for a lot of different companies like Qualcomm and Intel. It has never had such a partnership with Baidu before, the company that’s often referred to as China’s Google. However, it was announced today that Samsung will now be making chips for Baidu.

The Korean giant will be manufacturing Baidu’s new cloud-to-edge artificial intelligence chip called Baidu KUNLUN. The development has been completed and the chip will enter mass production from early next year.

Samsung enters into first foundry partnership with Baidu

Baidu KUNLUN is going to be built on the Chinese company’s own XPU neural processor architecture and fabricated on Samsung’s 14nm process technology with the I-Cube package solution. This solution integrates a System-on-Chip and a High Bandwidth Memory on a silicon interposer to form one single package to increase electrical transference. What this means is that the overall chip will take up less space in devices.

“Baidu KUNLUN is an important milestone for Samsung Foundry as we’re expanding our business area beyond mobile to datacenter applications by developing and mass-producing AI chips,” said Ryan Lee, VP of Foundry Marketing at Samsung Electronics.

The AI chip has a 512GBps memory bandwidth and can supply up to 260 Tera operations per second at 150 watts. This will allow Baidu to support a variety of functions with the chip such as large-scale AI workloads, autonomous driving, speech recognition, natural language processing and more.

This is the first foundry partnership between Samsung and Baidu which allows Samsung to expand its foundry business into high-performance computing chips. This leaves the door open for other companies to seek the Korean foundry’s services for their own HPC chips. This partnership is also notable owing to the overall geopolitical situation.

Chinese companies have increasingly been looking for alternatives to chips that were previously sourced from semiconductor companies in the United States. The ongoing trade war between China and the United States may just be adding to that search for alternatives. Having Baidu’s stamp of approval might lead to Samsung winning more foundry customers from China in the future. It’s an important partnership as Samsung seeks to significantly increase its earnings from the foundry business in the years to come.

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ESTV launches on Samsung TV Plus bringing 24-7 linear esports content

ESTV, the first-ever dedicated esports channel is launching on Samsung TV Plus, the company announced this week. ESTV is bringing esports content to Samsung’s ad-supported platform where it should be available on all of the company’s smart TVs launched in 2016 and later.

Samsung TV Plus gets more gaming-oriented content

ESTV is the first channel dedicated to esports and gives viewers access to a wide variety of gaming-related content, from gaming news and competitive gaming team analysis to syndicated late-night talk shows, live streaming of events, and interviews.

Samsung TV Plus seems like a great fit for ESTV, not only because it’s a free, ad-supported platform, but also because Samsung is already catering to the gaming audience to a degree, with the release of its gaming monitors for casual and competitive players. Meanwhile, on the mobile side of things, Samsung offers features like PlayGalaxy Link and Discord integration with its Game Launcher, so the company is no stranger to the concept of video games.

ESTV was released in the United States earlier in May as a 24-7 live linear channel. It launched on several platforms but it remains exclusive to the United States as of this writing. In other words, ESTV is now available on Samsung TV Plus only stateside. But if you do reside in the US and decide to check it out, you’re welcomed to share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Samsung details the Galaxy S11’s 108 MP ISOCELL camera

Samsung has published more details about its 108-megapixel ISOCELL Bright HMX sensor in a blog post and the accompanying videos on its website. The Korean company hyping up its camera sensors is nothing new, but this is interesting given that the Galaxy S11 is supposed to use the sensor for its primary camera, going by all the leaks and reports so far.

Interestingly, though the next Galaxy flagship is at least a couple of months away from launch, the said camera sensor has already made its debut in the Mi Note 10 last month. For what it’s worth, the sensor has proven to be quite a performer when paired even with the mid-range Snapdragon 730G chipset in the Mi Note 10. However, we will know its true potential when Samsung pairs the sensor with flagship chipsets and top-notch image processing in its upcoming flagship.

Samsung ISOCELL Bright HMX the first image sensor in the industry to surpass 100 million pixels and also the first to feature a larger 1/1.33-inch sensor size. The sensor comes with Smart-ISO technology that intelligently activates lower ISO in daylight and high ISO in low light for better dynamic range and less noise.

The sensor comes with Samsung’s ISOCELL Plus pixel isolation technology, which places a barrier around each pixel to prevent it from being contaminated by the colors of the adjacent pixels (also known as pixel crosstalk). The company says this is a major improvement over the previous sensors that were prone to quality degradation due to the crosstalk.

Samsung also says its Tetracell technology, which merges clusters of four pixels in the single pixels and thereby turning 0.8μm pixels into 1.6μm pixels, will improve low-light camera performance. It’s worth pointing out here that the same technology is already used in the company’s other sensors, and the results don’t seem to match the hype. We have to wait and see if this changes with the Galaxy S11.

To be clear, Samsung hasn’t officially confirmed this is going to be the sensor used in the Galaxy S11, but there is growing evidence to suggest that maybe the case. All this hype for a camera sensor, one that already made its debut on a competitor’s device, is indicative of the same. The Korean tech giant is expected to announce its next Galaxy flagship in the third week of February. As the launch date nears, we can expect more details about the device and its camera capabilities.

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Exclusive: Samsung has a new tablet in development likely with an S Pen

The next S Pen touting device from Samsung will be the Galaxy Note 10 Lite but it may not be the only one. We hear that Samsung is working on a new tablet that may possibly have an S Pen as well.

A new Samsung tablet bearing model number SM-P610 is in development alongside the SM-P615, which will most likely be the LTE variant of this tablet. Since the device is in the early stages of development, it may be a while before we see it in the flesh.

New Samsung tablet with an S Pen in development

Samsung is no stranger to launching tablets that come with an S Pen. The 2019 Galaxy Tab A with S Pen is one such example. It was launched almost nine months ago. The Galaxy Tab A with S Pen (SM-P205) is a fairly mid-range affair with specs like an Exynos 7904 processor, 3GB RAM and a 4,200mAh battery.

It goes without saying that this new tablet won’t be the successor to the Galaxy Tab S6. So it’s not going to have flagship-level specs. Perhaps it may be more of a premium mid-range device, but we’ll have to wait and see in which direction Samsung goes with regards to the specs.

Since the development is currently in the early stages, all that’s know about the SM-P610/615 is that it’s going to be available with both 64GB and 128GB of internal storage. As one would expect, Samsung is going to offer a book cover accessory for this tablet as well.

We expect to hear more information about this upcoming tablet in the coming days. So be sure to check back in with us if you’re interested in a Samsung tablet with an S Pen.

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Galaxy Fold pre-orders kick off in the Netherlands on December 20

Samsung may not have sold one million units of the Galaxy Fold despite what the rumors might have said, but the company is making that milestone more plausible by launching its foldable phone in yet another country. The Galaxy Fold will go up for pre-order in the Netherlands on December 20 from Samsung’s retail and online stores and carriers KPN and T-Mobile. Pre-ordered devices will reach customers on January 10. The Netherlands is getting the LTE variant of the Fold with a price tag of €2020.

While the Fold’s official launch in the Netherlands is taking place quite late in the game, the country was originally supposed to be in the initial list of release markets for the device. After deciding to delay the April launch of the Galaxy Fold owing to durability concerns caused by design oversights, Samsung decided to focus on bigger markets where it has a larger consumer base. But the wait for those in the Netherlands who were looking forward to getting the innovative and game-changing foldable is finally over.

Buying the Galaxy Fold will get consumers access to a 24/7 telephone helpline for one-to-one contact with experts, but it seems the cheap one-time screen replacement will not be available for Dutch customers. That offer, which reduces the price of screen replacement to €130, is supposed to be valid for purchases made before December 31, but it looks like Samsung is using the January 10 release date as an excuse to not extend that offer to consumers in the Netherlands.

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Galaxy Note 9 gets new Android 10 beta update

The Galaxy Note 9’s One UI 2.0 beta program is moving ahead today with the release of a new Android 10 beta update. This is the third beta update for the Galaxy Note 9 (fourth if we count the hotfix update that followed the initial beta release) and comes with a rather short list of bug fixes, suggesting that the stable Android 10 update for the device isn’t far away.

In fact, Samsung’s beta team has even said in the South Korean community forums that the company is focusing on getting the stable update out quickly by fixing existing bugs instead of introducing new features. That suggests that features like Bixby Routines, which are missing from the Android 10 beta for both the Galaxy Note 9 and Galaxy S9, could arrive with minor software updates after the initial stable update has been rolled out.

Issues fixed in the latest beta update — software version N960FXXU4ZSL7 — include an app crash in Samsung Pass, unstable mobile hotspot connection stability, iris recognition not working in Secure Folder, and a couple of others. We can confirm that the third Note 9 beta is available in India at this time, and owners of the phone in the UK and South Korea should be getting it as well. You can check if that’s the case by going into the Software update menu in the device settings and selecting Download and install.

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