The single largest cause for shortages with the most popular smartphones on the market today is the fact that the screens needed for the devices are in short supply. Screen shortages affect just about every popular device on the market today include many of the high-end devices from HTC.

Samsung Mobile Display is now committed to boost its production capacity of screens designed specifically for mobile devices. The current production capacity for screens is 3 million monthly at its manufacturing plant. A new manufacturing plant is set to come online next July and will raise the production capacity for 3-inch size screens to a much more robust 30 million each month.

Samsung Mobile Display VP Lee Woo-Jong wrote in an email quoted by The Wall Street Journal, "We've put in a great deal of effort to move up mass production."

Lee also stated that with the high demand for screens that the AMOLED business is now profitable for Samsung after years of heavy investment. The new production plant will cost Samsung in the area of $2.1 billion to get running. Samsung built the plan in Tang Jung, which is in the southern part of Seoul. The primary product built at the plant will be the aforementioned 3-inch mobile device screens.

Samsung Mobile Display provides screens for a number of different companies including Samsung Electronics. The shortages in screens have reportedly affected all phone makers equally with Samsung Electronics getting no preferential treatment for screens for devices like the Galaxy S.

HTC specifically named screen shortages as the reason it could not meet the demand for some of its high-end offerings like the EVO 4G and the Droid Incredible. To help get more of the popular smartphones onto the market HTC recently started using both AMOLED and Super LCD screens in its smartphones.

HTC's Martin Fichter said, "The display was definitely one of the bigger issues that we needed to solve."

Samsung expects the demand for its AMOLED screens to continue to grow with the expectation that 700 million devices will be using AMOLED screens by 2015. That is a 35 times increase from the number of AMOLED-equipped devices today.