iPhone Leading New Wave of Technology -- More Touch-Sensitive Devices to Follow Slick Unit's June 29

Jun 23, 08:57 AM

Current Headlines: By May Wong Associated Press

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Get your fingers ready.

Apple Inc.'s iPhone is leading a new wave of gadgets using touch- sensitive screens that react to taps, swishes or flicks of a finger. The improvements promise to be slicker and more intuitive than the rough stomp of finger presses and stylus-pointing required by many of today's devices.

Apple has been showing off its finger ballet in TV ads ahead of the phone's June 29 launch.

Glide a finger across the screen to use main menu. Slide your digit up or down to scroll through contacts. Flick to flip through photos. Tap to zoom in on a Web site.

With Apple's marketing machinery, the iPhone is poised to become the poster child for the new breed of touch-screen technology, which relies on changes in electrical currents instead of pressure points.

But the iPhone will have its fair share of rivals.

Shipments of this advanced strain of touch screens are projected to jump from fewer than 200,000 units in 2006 to more than 21 million units by 2012, with most going to mobile phones, forecasts iSuppli Corp., a market researcher.

"This new user interface will be like a tsunami, hitting an entire spectrum of devices," predicted Francis Lee, the chief executive of Synaptics Inc., a maker of touch sensors.

Synaptics' latest technology is in a growing number of cell phones, including LG Electronics Co.'s LG Prada touch-screen phone that launched this year in Europe and South Korea and handles gesture-recognition similarly to the iPhone.

Apple does not comment about suppliers, and Lee declined to say whether Synaptics is working on the iPhone.

Last fall, Nokia Corp.'s research and development unit unveiled online images of a prototype all-touch-screen cell phone called the Aeon .

"Touch screens are going to be more common, period, because rivals will slap them on to compete with Apple," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch.

About 38 million handsets, or about 4 percent of all mobile phones shipped in 2006, had touch-screen features - a figure that will grow to 90 million units by 2012, iSuppli projected.

But most touch-screen phones that shipped last year, including Palm Inc.'s Treo and Motorola Inc.'s ROKR E6, used "resistive touch" technology - the most common technology, said Jennifer Colegrove, a senior analyst of display technologies at iSuppli. It has two layers of glass or plastic and calculates the location of touch when pressure is applied with a stylus or finger.

A more advanced type of touch screen, featured on the iPhone and LG Prada, uses "projected capacitive" technology. A mesh of metal wires between two layers of glass registers a touch when the electrical field is broken.

That's why light finger brushes will do the trick. But capacitive sensors don't even need actual physical contact: such touch screens already detect the proximity of a finger from 2 millimeters away, Colegrove said.

The feather-like gestures that are possible with capacitive touch screens could feel more intuitive than the pokes needed on resistive touch screens that typically require a stylus or a fingernail to navigate. Capacitive touch screens are also generally brighter because their surface isn't covered with a thin film that's needed on resistive displays, Colegrove said.

The iPhone is the only cell phone that can handle more than one finger at once, analysts say. That technology, which Apple has patented, allows users to resize a window, for instance, by pinching or expanding two fingers on the display - at a retail price of $500 to $600.

"The iPhone," Colegrove said, "is going to be a catalyst for this technology."

(c) 2007 Commercial Appeal, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.