Touchscreens are the latest boom industry
HOT MONEY has been heading towards the Far East where touchscreen makers are coining it in thanks to the latest fashion in hardware.
Young Fast posted revenues of $48.2 million for October, which is up just over 81 per cent on the same time last year.
Young Fast ships both resistive and capacitive touch panels for handsets and is an example of the sort of revenues this relatively new industry has been making. In a press release the outfit expects revenues share of the capacitive segment to continue increasing in the fourth quarter, as the company has started shipping capacitive touch panel modules.
Touchscreen phone adoption grew by 159 percent between August 2008 and August 2009, according to ComScore. The firm also found that by the end of August 2009, there were 23.8 million users with touchscreen mobile phones in the United States alone.
Touchscreens first appeared in the 1960's and were first seen in 1972 as part of the PLATO project. HP was the first to get something to market that was vaguely touchscreen with its HP 150. It was fairly primitive and used infrared transmitters and receivers that detected the position of any non-transparent object on the screen.
The technology failed to take off until it developed the capability to sense how hard one is touching. Multitouch functions however really only caught the public's attention with the slick marketing from Apple and particularly its Iphone. Now it seems that every phone needs one with most high profile smart phones boasting a touchscreen.
Microsoft also started getting good reviews from its table top touch product called "Surface" and its Windows 7 was the first operating system to really use the technology. Not that many of us have had a chance to test it under pressure. However touchscreen monitors are not that much more expensive and are starting to push into the market.
But while the technology is pretty good, it still has a gimmicky feel to it. Touching screens also means that dirty paws are suddenly being put in the one place where you need to see things clearly. Touchscreens on smartphones are not proving as popular as many believe.
Many smart phone users actually prefer to use the traditional keyboard if they are sending texts or other functions. Some of the reasons for this range from fat fingers to the screen not being as reliable. How often do you think, "I wish I could just touch the screen rather than use a mouse?" Some of this could be the user's 'inner Luddite' screaming for attention, but there could equally be something else at play here - that is, that a touchscreen is simply a gimmick.
ComScore statistics show that a touchscreen user is most likely to be between the ages of 18 and 24 and that 51.4 percent of smartphone users are under the age of 35. This is the age group that is supposed to be fairly cutting edge on technology but it is also the market that is the least reliable in terms of fads and fashions.
It could be that touchscreens will have their brief moment of glory before disappearing beneath the next fad to come along. µ
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Capacitive multi touch will quickly prevail over that horrid two foil based touchscreen design.
-I can't think of a single useful function of touch screens. Much like voice commands. I've been able to talk to my pc for over a decade yet as of now I have yet to think of anything useful to say to it.
Touchscreen means fingerprints over fingerprints on the screen. Nobody is bothered by this?
The NDS has a touch screen but frankly it's just a gimmick, most games don't really use it or offer it as an alternative to the keys.
However some of the games could only have been done usefully with a touch screen (Brain Training for example) and where they used their imagination it was tremendous fun.
As for dirty screens, just use washable screens. Also, imagine a soft rubber thimble that fits over your digits with a small nub on the end for touching the screen. If guitarists can use a plectrum, geeks can use thimbles.
The potential is enormous, it's the next revolution in computing, just as big as the step from keyboard+dos to mouse+GUI.
It's just that most people have been doing things so long the keyboard way (There are guy who've been computer geeks for 40 years+ now) they find it hard to imagine doing it any other way and are not very good at imagining useful multitouch software.
But once it comes, those who insist on the mouse+keyboard will be just as funny and archaic as those who insisted valve amplifiers were better than digital ones because the sound was "warmer"...
The way a touchscreen should replace a mouse is by having something like a mousepad be the touchscreen, not your monitor. It would be illuminated like a regular screen, and perhaps have customizable icons to change functions. It would be far more natural to control things down where they've been controlled all along. You could even put it just below the space bar, and use your thumbs for simple things, and that way keep your fingers on the keyboard.
If I've just come up with a brilliant and original idea, please send me money.
It's bad enough I have to tolerate people touching the monitor to point out stuff on the screen, but to use it as a primary means to interact with the computer? No thanks. Touchscreens are made for situations where you need dynamic buttons and that's it. They're good for kiosks and phones, but computer interfaces are simply not designed for their use (try resizing a window with one).
Good luck with *that* industry.
The dismissal of touchscreens is not entirely fair. To us techies, the hand-eye co-ordintaion required to use a mouse/trackpad-pointer combination is taken for granted. However, many people seem to have a block with this arrangement, my father has struggled for years in co-ordinating the two, and I know many other younger users who have similar problems. They all complain of feeling "detached" from the computer for this reason, and somehow keep having to look down at the mouse to sense how to move it. To be able to touch the screen and see an instant result will be a breakthrough for these users, and confer a much greater sense of involvement in using their Pcs and laptops. Who cares if the screen is covered with fingerprints if it means you can actually use the thing to your advantage? After all, you don't worry about food messing the plate when you eat a meal, do you? You don't see i-Phone users complaining about their touch screens either! This advance has been long overdue, and I for one welcome it wholeheartedly! However, I do think keyboards will remain for some time, on screen typing is not really an advantage so far, at least!