Apple didn’t introduce touch screens to cell phones. Palm was producing touch-screen smart phones long before Apple entered the mobile handset market. But with its first iPhone, Apple did popularize capacitive touch screens in handsets, which allowed them to introduce a multi-touch (actually two-touch) interface that has proven popular with users.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

Up until that time, small touch screens tended to use resistive touch technology because resistive was cheaper and used simpler controller technology. But the high-volume resistive technologies of the time only supported single-touch. So Apple went with capacitive, drove the cost of capacitive down, and set the stage for capacitive to become the mainstream touch technology for handsets.

That transition is expected to come this year, industry sources told Susie Pan and Steve Shen of Digitimes last month, as shipments of handsets with projected capacitive touch panels exceed those of handsets with resistive touch panels in 2010. Production of projected capacitance panels is under way at Wintek, Sintek Photronic, Cando, Emerging Display Technologies and Giantplus, among others.

Sintek intends to ramp its manufacturing capacity for capacitive touch panels to 24M/month (3.5-inch equivalent) in Q3′10, using a Gen 5 facility, and Giantplus plans to begin volume production with 1M/month (3.5-inch equivalent), also in Q3.

Touch interfaces are now commonplace on a variety of feature phones and smartphones, but they are single-touch for the most part. That is about to change with Ver. 2.1 of the Android OS, which supports multi-touch and is a software upgrade for existing Android phones.

Apple is responding, not with new round of technical innovation, but with a patent infringement suit against HTC, the largest maker of Android phones. Apple claims that Android-based HTC handsets violate 20 of its patents, including those relating to the phone’s "detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display."

Some of Apple’s key claims look questionable based on the existence of "prior art," but independent patent attorneys have been quoted as saying that Apple’s real purpose is to slow the roll-out of new Android versions and new Android-based handsets. In other words, Apple is worried.

All of this comes while a series of patent infringement suits and counter-suits between Apple and Nokia are in process, as is a suit against Apple from Elan Microelectronics (Hsinchu, Taiwan) for alleged infringement of Elan’s multi-touch patents.

Apple undoubtedly has great industrial design and excellent marketing, and frequently offers products with genuine technical innovation (despite the recent counter-example of the iPad). Nonetheless, Apple is beginning to eclipse Microsoft as the technology company everybody loves to hate.

Apple is right to be concerned. It’s "walled garden" approach is in marked contrast to Android’s open universe. As the gap between the iPhone’s polish and the occasional clunkiness of Android phones narrows, what will be left for Apple to sell?