panels

Samsung found itself the target of a police raid in South Korea on Monday over the alleged theft of OLED display panel technology.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency investigated Samsung's headquarters in Asan, South Korea, in an attempt to find documents related to OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology, Bloomberg reported late yesterday.

Police are trying to determine whether Samsung is tangled up in an alleged leak of OLED technology documents by partners of LG Display, a Samsung spokesman told Bloomberg. No details were revealed as to who called the police, but LG said it didn't contact them.

"… Read more

Saudi Arabia wants to spend over $100 billion to build vast solar arrays and reduce its dependency on oil to generate electricity. But desert sandstorms pose a major challenge to keeping solar panels clean and efficient.

Japanese startup Miraikikai is developing a solution to getting rid of this pesky dust and grit: a cleaning robot that doesn't need water.

The firm has produced the Wall Walker wall and ceiling robot, and recently unveiled a prototype solar panel cleaner built with researchers at Kagawa University.

It weighs about 24 pounds -- light enough to be carried by one person -- and measures about 22 inches across. … Read more

Windows Blue has triggered a spate of doomsaying about the end of the Windows desktop.

Today there has been no shortage of articles claiming that Blue portends the end of Windows 8 desktop mode. You know, the mode that most Windows 8 users spend their time in.

Rumored changes for Metro -- the Windows 8 touch-centric tablet mode -- include a different way to handle multitasking in side-by-side snap view. Possibly providing less reason to drop to the desktop for multitasking.

But what seems to have most observers worried is the changes to Control Panel.

Here's what Information Week … Read more

When I'm not blogging for CNET, I test and review laptops and desktops. During the getting-to-know process for each system I review, one of the places I usually stop by first is the Control Panel to tweak a setting or two before I start running benchmark tests. In the good old days of Windows 7 and XP, I simply clicked on the Start button and selected the Control Panel from the Start menu. With Windows 8, however, that path does not exist.

If you are using a tablet or refuse to engage in keyboard shortcuts, you'll need to … Read more

Apple enjoyed a healthy gain in consumer technology sales last year amid a down market.

The iPhone maker took home 19.9 percent of all consumer technology sales in the U.S., up from 17.3 percent in 2011, according to stats released today by NPD Group.

Based on sales, Apple proved to be the top consumer brand for the year, outshining Samsung, HP, Sony, and Dell. Beyond Apple, only Samsung's cut of revenues rose among the five, reaching 9.3 percent from 7 percent the prior year.

Together, Apple and Samsung scooped up $6.5 billion in higher … Read more

Ultraslim notebooks -- defined as x86-based PCs with screen sizes between 10 and 17 inches and thicknesses of no greater than 21mm -- are seeing shipments squeezed by display technology, a new study from NPD DisplaySearch has revealed. But that won't be enough to keep them down.

"The high-end specifications for touch on Windows 8 PCs, and the unproven consumer demand for touch on notebooks has touch-screen suppliers leery of shifting capacity from the high volume smartphone and tablet PC markets to notebook PCs," Richard Shim, senior analyst with NPD DisplaySearch, said today in a statement.

According … Read more

Many programs, such as Microsoft Office, support their own interfaces for various fonts you may have installed on your Mac; however, many other programs like TextEdit and Apple's Pages use Apple's central Font panel to provide font management. This panel can usually be invoked by pressing Command-T in programs that support it, where you will be presented with a column-oriented view of font collections that you can navigate through, select, and set the size for.

While convenient for quickly selecting and setting font sizes, the Font panel also contains a number of additional features that can be applied … Read more

Samsung and LG Display have been fined by the Chinese government over charges that they fixed the prices of LCD panels.

China's National Development and Reform Commission fined Samsung $16.2 million and LG $18.6 million, according to the Yonhap News Agency.

Also included in the fines for price fixing were four Taiwanese firms: Chi Mei Optoelectronics, AU Optronics, Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd., and HannStar Display. The total fine levied against all six companies reached $56 million.

The display makers were accused of fixing prices on LCD panels that they sold to Chinese TV makers from 2001 to … Read more

Update: This event has now run and you can watch the full video below.

I'm the Editor of CNET UK and I've been going to CES for over a decade now. But there's one country's tech I almost never see reported on at the show -- my own. I've always wondered why that is.

Brits have been involved in so many important tech inventions over the years, from television to the World Wide Web -- are our best discoveries behind us, or do we still have something left to give?

On Tuesday at 2 p.… Read more