One of the main goals of any wearable health and fitness device is to gather information so that it can be shared. One common way to share this data is to send it to some other device — such as a smartphone — over a wireless connection. There are applications, however, where you’ll want the device to display information directly. For a wearable device, you want the display to be thin, light, bright, and durable.
Those characteristics sum up the new display that Samsung Display exhibited at the Society for Information Display (SID) Display Week 2014 international conference in San Diego last week. The company showed the panel that is used in the Samsung Gear Fit. The panel is about 1.7 inches tall and about a half-inch wide (1.8-inch diagonal), and flexible so that it could be curved to create a watch that conforms to the curve of your wrist. It uses active matrix OLED technology, which is an emissive design (creates its own light) that provides great color and contrast in a display.
This panel has a resolution of 128 by 432 (horizontal by vertical) pixels. While this is not high enough to watch movies, it is more than sufficient to provide a useful data display.
Samsung also showed the half-inch square OLED panel (1.6″ diagonal) that is used in the Gear 2 smart watch. It has 320 by 320 pixels resolution.
