ZT: Touch mania swipes across markets

小猩猩

Touch mania swipes across markets
R. Colin Johnson
6/7/2011 10:13 AM EDT

Touchscreens have been available since the days of cathode-ray tubes, but the technology didn’t really catch on with consumers until mobile phone makers adopted it to solve the tiny-button problem. Now touchscreen smartphones and tablets collectively constitute the fastest-growing electronics market segment.



According to DisplaySearch (Santa Clara, Calif.), shipments of touchscreen tablets are forecast to reach 60 million units in 2011 and could top 260 million units by 2016. Add to that the more than 400 million mobile phone touchscreens predicted by IHS iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.), and the total market could top $10 billion this year (see sidebar, last page).



“Touchscreens have been around for a long time, but they were only popular in business and industrial settings, such as food service, airport kiosks and industrial keypads,” said Rhoda Alexander, director of monitor research at IHS iSuppli. “The real transition for consumers … was when Apple moved into smartphones and then tablets. Before then, consumer touchscreens didn’t work very well, because they had to operate a standard OS. But with the move to smartphones and tablets, operating systems like iOS have enabled a very touch-friendly user interface.”



Google’s Android OS—the first major competitor to Apple’s iOS—-did not support multitouch at introduction, but the latest incarnation accommodates a wide array of multitouch gestures. Some of them—including spin, thrust and slice—are unique to Android; all will work identically on any Android smartphone or touchscreen tablet. The BlackBerry Tablet OS and Windows Phone OS have similarly become touch-enabled.



“Handset makers used to give us a long list of obstacles to adopting touchscreens, but when Apple introduced the iPhone all those obstacles suddenly seemed surmountable,” said Andrew Hsu, technology strategist at Synaptics Inc.