What They Say
Sharpo announced a new Aquos R6 smartphone in the Japanese market. It has only a single back camera, but it has a 1″ sensor, the biggest ever on a smartphone and the camera was developed with Leitz.
The device has an IGZO 6.67″ 2730 x 1260 OLED display that can support variable rates from 1Hz to 240Hz. It has peak brightness of 2,000 cd/m² and is powered by a Snapdragon 888 and has 12GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. There is an under-display fingerprint scanner and the battery has 5,000mAh capacity.
What We Think
Sharp has good IGZO technology as Ian reported in his recent round-up of IGZO developments (The Role of Increased Semiconductor Mobility – an IGZO Case Study). Sharp, as we have reported for the last ten years, has often shown impressive small OLEDs at SID, exploiting its IGZO skills, but has not been in volume production. Further, after starting to make flexible OLEDs a couple of years ago it gave up as being ‘unable to compete’ with Korean suppliers in 2019.
However, we saw yesterday (Japan’s Sharp reaps fruits of Apple ties in LCD business) that Sharp’s small LCD business has been more stable than others, but the writing is on the wall. If the firm doesn’t make OLEDs, it will be out of the small display business. That’s not new but there have been a lot of changes in recent years at Sharp, so it’s not impossible that the firm is having one final try to make the most of its technology. (BR)
