December 27, 2007
Touching on a 2007 trend
Touch-typing took on a new meaning for me this year as I struggled to hit the right letters with my fingers on the touch-sensitive iPhone.
What was more satisfying was the multi-touch capabilities the iPhone introduced – expanding the size of a photo by the spreading of fingers, stroking through a music collection in Cover Flow mode.
Touch has been a major trend of 2007, from the iPod touch and iPhone and their imitators to Microsoft’s coffee-table Surface PC.
Balda, a German company, was a major beneficiary of the iPhone’s popularity, with its glass screen, whose software can detect several fingers at once, being adopted by Apple.
Synaptics, a Silicon Valley company, has also got in on the act – its touch technology is now in more than 25 phones.
“In devices which give you the maximum visual information and where there’s no room for keyboards, the touch screen becomes your user interface,” Francis Lee, Synaptics chief executive, told me.
Synaptics is better known for its touch pads that replace a mouse in notebook PCs. I rarely click anything on my notebook these days, using “tap zones” on the touch pads to replace a mouse left- or right-click and stroking the pad to scroll through pages or zoom in or out.
Global revenues for touch-screen technologies will nearly double from 2006 to 2012, rising from $2.4bn to $4.4bn, according to the iSuppli research firm.
It lists eight leading technologies – resistive, surface capacitive, projected capacitive, infrared, surface acoustic wave, optical, bending wave and active digitizer – and eight emerging ones - photo sensor in pixel, polymer waveguide, distributed light, strain gauge, multi-touch, dual-force touch, laser-point activated touch and 3D touch.
Resistive products are currently the cheapest and most common types of touch screen and revenues should increase at a compound annual growth rate of 3.1 per cent to 2012, says iSuppli. In contrast, multi-touch revenues, helped by the iPhone and expected adoption by handheld game consoles and map browsing systems, are expected to grow at a rate of 31 per cent.
