Walking the streets at night could soon be a less intimidating experience for many, as a crop of solar-powered 'tree' lights by Brit designer Ross Lovegrove are set to blossom all over Europe.

Unlike conventional incandescent lamps which need to convert the electricity into thermal energy first and then to light, LED illumination is achieved when a semiconductor crystal is activated so that it directly produces visible light in a desired wavelength range. With the continuous development of lighting technologies, more possible future applications of LEDs will be seen. Advantages and disadvantages of using LEDs are to be discussed as follows. Advantages of LEDs 1. Long Lifespan

Since the second half of 2007, NB panels with white LED backlight has been increasingly popular because it’s thinner, lighter and more energy-saving and more portable. Environment protection is another concern among customers, which encourages many NB manufacturers to adopt LED without mercury as backlight. Especially since Apple announced to produce all NB with LED backlight in May 2007, many others follow suit.

Currently, LCD panel’s market is facing fluctuating on its pricing. After those dominate manufacturers are competing each other to promote themselves to next generation product line, the trend is increasing their ratio on using LED backlight module.

In CEATEC JAPAN 2007 exhibited recently in Japan , Japanese electronics giant SONY Corp announced the LED LCDTV back light module technology used in the latest 70-inch module of BRAVIA LCD TV . As one of the leader brands of LCD TV, SONY’s choice of back light module technology will certainly cause some influence to the industry, especially the trend of LED modules used in high-end LCD TV and designs of periphreals. It’s possible that the most common strategy might be mimicking SONY, SAMSUNG and SHARP.

It appears MacBook Pro keyboards will come with OLED touch panels after all, Cult of Mac has leaked photos of the OLED panel enhanced notebooks, which it obtained from an Apple supplier.