If you thought the unimpressive performance of LG’s G Flex would be enough to steer the company away from flexible OLED screens, guess again. ZDNet Korea says that instead of shying away from production of flexible OLEDs, LG Display is actually thinking about increasing production on the panels this year. According to LG Display CEO Han Seng Beom, there are two reasons to ramp up production instead of scaling it back: Han says the company is getting “many requests for plastic OLED from our smartphone (making) clients,” and there’s a significant amount of interest in wearable devices.
Of course, expecting a wearables boom is a lot different than there actually being one, so Han and LG Display aren’t quite ready to pull the trigger on this plan just yet. Han said the company will “finalize” its plan in the first half of this year, after it gets a chance to view the market and see how it changes in the coming months. Still, with some big companies like Apple tapped to release wearable devices of their own this year, it sounds like LG wants to be ready to compete. It obviously thinks that small, flexible OLED displays are perfect for wearables like smart watches, so we could very well see the company’s investment in flexible OLEDs pay off. For what it’s worth, we’re still not sure how the LG G Flex has fared in markets outside of South Korea. While South Korean sales were a tad disappointing – we heard in January that the phone had only moved 13,000 units since launching in November – that isn’t necessarily indicative of performance in other parts of the world. The phone has a decent set of specs aside from the flexible display, sporting 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, and a Snapdragon 800 CPU clocked at 2.3GHz, so that list of specifications may lure in the folks who are indifferent toward the curved display.
The phone enjoyed its worldwide launch just last week, so we’ll be waiting a little while longer before we get some concrete sales numbers. We’ll also be playing the waiting game when it comes to additional details about this potential plan to increase production of flexible displays. That being said, those of you who like the idea of curved displays on your tech toys probably have a few things to look forward to from LG. Stay tuned.