Apple released their newest iPhone this morning, called the 3G S, almost exactly two years after the first iPhone forever changed the mobile phone market. Not only did the iPhone revolutionize how we think about phones, but it hastened the advent of touchscreens. Three ways the touchscreen industry has changed:

1. Lower costs: Apple has been buying millions of capacitive touchscreens and driving down costs in Asia. Three years ago resistive screens were ubiquitous because of price, but now capacitive screens are cost-effective in many applications. The hot new product of 2007 spurred the adoption of touchscreens in all types of devices–further driving down costs. Even HP now markets their razor-and-blade Photosmart printer with a 6″ touchscreen LCD screen.

2. Innovation: Five years ago who would ever have really imagined watching television on their cell phone in some remote locate? But now Major League Baseball and Apple offer an app that streams live baseball games to the palm of your hand. Competitors have been scrambling to compete with the iPhone and introduced some new technologies and approaches to designing phones and phone software. Samsung has since introduced an AM-OLED touchscreen (active-matrix organic light emitting diode). Blackberry introduced the Storm with SurePress touch screen technology. The Palm Pre (below) is a very sensitive capacitive touchscreen with a higher pixel density than the iPhone. Touch technology is also expanding into personal computing with Windows 7, NextWindow and N-Trig.

3. Touch Fluency: I attended the Interactive Display conference this spring and there was a healthy debate over multi-touch vs. dual-touch screens. Jeff Han was arguing that his technology was true multi-touch (you can use all ten fingers or even multiple users) whereas the iPhone is limited to dual-touch (pinching with just two fingers). The fact that this would even be discussed at the conference is a testament to Apple’s penetration in the market. My father (age 61) and my son (age 3) can both easily zoom in and out on the iPhone with what are now standard touchscreen gestures.

Touchscreens have been around for years, but we must pay homage to the iPhone for bringing touch to the people and making touchscreens acceptable and even demanded in all kinds of devices.

For those Apple nuts who can never get their fill, David Carnoy from CNet is already looking ahead to the iPhone 4G (in 364 days if you’re counting).

Tags: iPhone, Touchscreen

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 1:57 PM and is filed under Apple, Capacitive, HP, Multitouch, N-Trig, Resistive, Touchscreen, Touchscreen computers, Vissumo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.