Taiwan-based G-Tech Optoelectronics (GTOC), an optical glass processing service provider located in the Chung-Xing Industrial Park and a member company of the Foxconn Group, and TPK Touch Solutions, a glass-based projected capacitive touch panel manufacturer, announced on June 23rd that the two companies will form a joint venture. According to DIGITIMES, each company will hold 50% equity stake in the joint venture that will focus on producing reinforced glass substrates for touch panel applications. The joint venture will be located in Xiamen, China.

GTOC not only processes high-tech optical glass, the company conducts chemical and physical tempered processing, glass print processing, cutting and polishing LCD glass, electronic component manufacturing such as glass for scanner applications, moisture-proof cases, and screen filters.

The joint venture, which has yet to have a name, is expected to commence operations by the end of the third quarter  in 2010 and enter into volume production in the fourth quarter. Production capacity has not been announced but according to Alex Jiang, President at GTOC, the new plant at the joint venture will have a similar capacity to that of the company’s existing plant located in the Southern Taiwan Science Park (STSP). GTOC’s plant in STSP currently has a monthly input capacity of 40,000 to 50,000 Gen 5 glass substrates. According to sources, GTOC is a supplier of projected capacitive touch panels used in Apple’s iPhone and iPad products.

Bryan Jones is a retinal neuroscientist, took a microscope and photographed sub-pixel level images of the iPad, the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 4G. What he discovered was a non-square-shaped pixel structure of the iPhone 4G’s Retina Display. The pixel dimension was measured to be about 102×78µm. Bear in mind Jones noted that he was experiencing difficulty calibrating the microscope and that the measurements are approximates. He also seems to have pictured the iPhones in landscape mode while the iPad was in portrait orientation. Usually the sub-pixel arrangements are red, green, blue going side ways.

Both the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G had a pixel dimension of approximately 500×190µm (when iPhone is in portrait orientation). Both photographs exhibited slight blurriness due to the non-bonded nature of the display in addition to the touch layer adding to light refraction. The iPhone 4 pixel-level photograph exhibited no such blurriness thanks to the optical lamination process that almost eliminates light refraction. But then I got confused.

Jones mentioned the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G has a pixel dimension of 190×500µm. But a paragraph down he lists 176×223µm. I thought it was the sub-pixel dimension but that can’t be; it isn’t a multiple of three. What is this? I’m not sure. So I decided to forget the 500×190µm or 190×500µm dimension Jones mentioned.

I’m going with 223×176µm for the previous iPhones and 102×78µm for the iPhone 4. As you can see these measurements are approximate since the larger pixel from the previous generation iPhones is not exactly four times as large as the iPhone 4: the short side is but the long side isn’t.

Another interesting thing is that two Ph.D candidates from Penn State University took some measurements with a microscope and found the pixel dimension of the iPhone 4′s Retina Display to be 20×20µm (read iPhone 4 Pixels Under The Microscope for more info). That is a significant difference between the two. Go figure.

The bottom line:

Here is the deal though… While Dr. Soneira was partially correct with respect to the retina, Apple’s Retina Display adequately represents the resolution at which images fall upon the retina.

For the complete calculation take a look at Jonesblog’s Apple Retina Display article. And here’s what I concluded in Retina Display I wrote back on June 9th:

So when Jobs said, “It turns out that there’s a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch that when you hold some thing around 10 or 12 inches away from your eyes is the limit of the human retina to differ­entiate the pixels,” he was generally right. He was addressing ordinary folks and for most of us his statement about 300PPI as a limit of visual acuity was not exaggerated.

Ph.D candidates Ryan White and Bryan Gauntt of Penn State University took a very close look at the iPhone 4′s Retina Display using a microscope. They measured the sub-pixel sizes and found the ones in the iPhone 3G to be 13×40 microns. Each pixel would be about 40×40 microns including the two TFT lines among the three sub-pixels. The sub-pixels on the iPhone 4G were smaller by exactly 1/4 at 6.5×20 microns. Pixel dimensions are probably 20×20 microns. Read Retina Display and iPhone 4 for more info. Additional closeups at Engadget.

There does seem to be a shortage for the 9.7-inch IPS LCD panels going into Apple’s iPad, which has sold three million units in 80 days (read Apple Sold Three Million iPads In 80 Days). LG Display (LGD) is the main supplier of those panels shipping 300K in February, 470K in March and up to 700K in April and in May. According to DIGITIMES, Samsung is the secondary source for the iPad panels and the company has shipped 100K in May and is expected to grow to 300-500K in July. Now Chimei Innolux (CMI) is seeking to license FFS technology from E Ink Holdings, previously Prime View International (PVI), to become another iPad display source for Apple. PVI by purchasing Hydis from BOE gained FFS, which stands for fringe field switching. FFS is very similar to IPS in terms of display performance and has some very good features: sunlight readability, low power consumption, wide viewing angles, fast response time and high brightness. PVI has already licensed it FFS technology to IPS Alpha, Hitachi, Sanyo Epson Image Devices and LGD.

I have a few questions and maybe some of you can help answer them. How is it that Samsung is able to manufacture IPS LCD panels for Apple’s iPad? Did Samsung license IPS from either LGD or Hitachi? Wouldn’t it take considerable time getting up to speed in volume manufacturing high-quality IPS LCD panels that meet Apple’s specifications? Is there a quality difference between Samsung’s and LGD’s 9.7-inch IPS LCD panels? And would a non-IPS CMI-built FFS panel be qualified for the iPad program?

It might be just me but I would bet there is some difference between the iPad panels that are being made by LGD versus Samsung. There is a reason why Apple has always chosen IPS display technology for its high-end non-notebook displays (notebooks are 100% TN for some odd reason): Apple considers IPS better than MVA, PVA, ASV, etc. If I were in the market for an iPad I would certainly want it to have a LGD-manufactured bona fide IPS LCD panel.

As reported on DIGITIMES and according to HTC, its Wildfire Android 2.1-based smartphone has the lowest introductory price for the company at NT$11,900 or about US$372. That doesn’t sound so low, but I’m guessing that price is unsubsidized. The HTC Wildfire features a smallish 3.2-inch capacitive touch display with a fairly low pixel count of 320×240, a 5 megapixel camera and is available on Taiwan Mobile. For those that have smaller hands or just prefer something a little smaller than the giant Motorola Droid X (read Motorola Droid X) or the HTC EVO 4G, the Wildfire might just be the right size. In the next few months the HTC Wildfire will hit Australia, Hong Kong, India part of Southeast Asia and South Korea.

Eliminate: Gun Range from ngmoco is the first iPhone 4 game that takes advantage of the built-in gyroscope. The first person shooter game’s control becomes more direct. It is $0.99 and there’s already a newer updated version 1.0.1. Here’s the iTunes Preview page.

Nilay Patel:

E:GR is itself just a simple shooter, but the gyroscope adds what seems like nearly 1:1 motion control to the proceedings — and since you’re moving the display itself, it almost feels like augmented reality.

MG Siegler:

Rather than dragging your finger around the screen to tell your gun where to aim, you simply tilt the iPhone itself. Sure, you could sort of do this previously with the compass built in to the iPhone 3GS — but trust me, this is much, much better.

The possibilities! Check out the videos on Engadget and TechCrunch.

Starting today, June 25, 2010, you can pre-order Motorola’s Droid X at Best Buy. The price is a penny under $200 plus all those taxes with a two-year agreement. (A quick aside: those taxes might be a good thing since there is a rumor that the US might shift to value added taxes or VAT that becomes hidden in the price of the goods and services you purchase.) The good thing about pre-ordering the Droid X from Best Buy instead of Verizon Wireless is you don’t have to worry about sending in that time-consuming mail-in rebate. The Droid X will be available at Best Buy stores on July 15. Read Motorola Droid X for more info. PS: I can’t seem to find Droid X on Best Buy’s website; only the non-X Droid is showing up.

MiFi takes 3G signals and gives you a WiFi connection. FaceTime works on WiFi because it needs the bigger bandwidth. Well, it turns out FaceTime works using MiFi, but barely. Videos of the attempts can be found on Engadget. What this means to me is with a bit more tweaking of 3G network throughput (reliability too!) and a bit more ingenuity injected into better video compression we could possible see FaceTime become available on both WiFi and 3G soon.

There is an article on kottke.org with interesting quotes from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Amazon) related to the initial popularity of videophones and then the rapid fallout. The reasons for excitement over video phone calls are many. What resonates with me is the ability to see the faces of loved ones when you are away from them. Of course if you simply wanted to chat via video there were many options available to you before Apple’s FaceTime was introduced, but not something that worked well on a smartphone. In the book, Wallace points to three reasons why people switched back to voice: emotional stress, physical vanity, and “a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.” A video call will demand more from us in terms of attention and appearance and some will be stressed out because of it.

Got an iPhone 4? Got no one to use the FaceTime feature with? Apple’s got your back. Dial 1-888-FACETIME (1-888-322-3846) if you want to FaceTime with an Apple employee who will show you the basics and some advanced tips. Available from 8am to 8pm CDT.

MacWorld:

… the highest scoring of all the smartphone cameras that we tested, was none other than the iPhone 4. Next in the rankings was the Droid X, followed by the EVO 4G, the Samsung Galaxy, and way at the bottom, the iPhone 3GS.

It is interesting to note that both the Droid X and the EVO 4G sports a camera with 8 megapixels, three more than Apple’s iPhone 4 with just five. More megapixels doesn’t mean better quality photographs. The 1/3.2-inch CMOS image sensor in the iPhone 4 is special with its backside illumination, which shifts the circuitry from the front to the back allowing the photons to reach the photoreceptors with less blockage. And more light means better photos. The iPhone 4 also takes good pictures in low light for a smartphone. The 3.85-mm lens on the iPhone 4 feature a fixed aperture of f/2.8 with shutter speed and ISO automatically adjusted. According to MacWorld it seems the ISO ranges from 80 to 1000 with exposure as fast as 1/10,000 of a second to 1/15th a second.

Also of note is the video quality rankings:

While its image quality was impressive, it was the iPhone 4′s video capabilities that really stole the show in our lab tests. Of the eight devices we rated for video, only the Flip Video M2120 scored higher.

The iPhone 4 even bested Sony’s DSC-WX1 in video quality.

DisplayBlog is written and produced by Jin Kim. Subscribe via RSS.