ABI Research’s new report “Mobile Displays and Touchscreens” studies the emerging display and touchscreen technologies targeted at smartphones, handsets, eReaders, media tablets, and PNDs.
It examines the use of competing technologies such as EMR, ERT, resistive, capacitive, and SAW and takes the pulse of those technologies still in lab development. It provides unit shipments and attach rates by technology and region across the various mobile device segments.
Touchscreens can claim as much credit for the booming success of smartphones as can 3G data speeds. In the time prior to the launch of the original iPhone, smartphones with touchscreens have gone from 7% of the total smartphone volume in 2006 to 75% in 2010, and were a key driver to the market growing more than 325% over that period. Over the next five years, touchscreens will be as pervasive in smartphones as Wi-Fi chipsets are today, reaching 97% of all smartphones by 2016 Says ABI Research.
Screen and touch technologies continue to evolve and are starting to reshape the markets for other classes of mobile devices. “Low-cost capacitive touch controllers that use just a single layer of sensors instead of two, and save as much as 30% on the cost, are opening the market for lower-end feature phones” says Kevin says Kevin Burden, vice president, mobile devices.
Kevin further said that “eReaders, which are the most fragmented device category in both display and touch technology, now have options that not only enable finger touch, but are at a cost that could standardize the segment’s displays,”
Image courtesy of Macrumors.com
