Despite some recent law suits to the contrary, Apple didn’t invent either touch technology or multi-touch technology. But with the iPhone and the iPad, the fruit-logoed mammoth has certainly popularized it.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

Now, more than ever, designers and product managers responsible for mobile handsets, tablets, e-Readers, and even digital cameras are thinking about touch, and sometimes wrestling with the trade-offs between touch control and image quality.

In R&D labs far from the manufacturing floor, touch is just the beginning. The next paradigm is the natural user interface, which attempts to use motions that come naturally to human beings and don’t have to be learned. "The future’s going to be in fusing together several different natural human behaviors — how people point, gesture and coordinate with each other," Microsoft Research distinguished scientist Eric Horvitz told Claire Cain Miller, who reported the comment in a story she wrote for yesterday’s New York Times. "Touch," continued Horvitz, "is a beautiful tip of the iceberg for talking about where things are really headed."

The Synaptics Fuse concept — which combines touch, squeeze, tilt, and the ability to "see" where you finger is pressing on a touch sensor on the rear of a handset — is one next-generation model, which we’ve discussed previously in Display Daily. The UrbanSpoon restaurant app for smart phones presents its restaurant choices in the form of the three wheels in an old mechanical slot machine. The wheels are set spinning by shaking your handset (or pushing a soft button if shaking your phone seems too ostentatious).

As interesting as the next generation of interfaces may be, products are now being designed with more or less conventional touch screens (if we can now call multi-touch conventional), and the business is booming.

Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) says it plans to convert 70% of the production capacity of its Gen 4.5 line in northern Taiwan to producing capacitive touch sensors. The company expects monthly shipments of touch sensors to grow to over 3M units in 2H’10, compared to 2M units in the first half.

Cando, the AUO subsidiary that makes color filters (CF), will start producing touch panels at a remodeled Gen 4.5 plant this month, industry sources told Susie Pan and Yvonne Yu at Digitimes. Chimei Innolux (CMI) has announced plans to establish touch panel production lines in Taiwan and China, the sources said, while HannStar is cooperating with CF maker Sintek Photronic on touch-sensor production.

With the demand for touch panels for tablet PCs expected to grown, CPT is evaluating whether it should produce touch panels at its Gen 6 line, or perhaps even provide total touchscreen solutions, Pan and Yu reported.

Sony is making its next generation of eBook readers all touch, but has heard the complaints about the glare from the touch screen on its current touch-screen model. The company says it is modifying the touch screen in such a way as to preserve the inherent "paper-like" character of the E Ink display. You can also expect a touch Kindle, again with a touch technology that does not degrade E Ink’s inherent readability.

Touch is clearly the focus of most efforts today as it becomes a mainstream technology, but this is only the beginning of a long road in improving the human interface.