Apple has jump-started a touch-screen revolution: If it's not tactile, it's not practical

Since last year, the wireless world has had Apple to thank (or blame) for spearheading many handset trends while heightening customer expectations in the process. One such trend is the suddenly must-have touch-screen. With LG and Samsung quick to follow Apple off the starting line, touch-screens are becoming the latest feature to steal the limelight in wireless.

Although they have been on the market for awhile, 2008 is poised to be the year when touch-screens really take hold. iSuppli predicts global shipment revenue for leading touch-screen technologies will rise to $4.4 billion by 2012, up from $2.4 billion in 2006.

“The touch-screen is essentially a new form factor, just like the previous big form factor was ‘thin’ — first thin clamshells then just thin everything,” said Avi Greengart, research director of mobile devices for Current Analysis. “It is a way of developing a product and creating a different look and user interface. Where things get really interesting is when you use the touch-screen to provide a completely different user interface than anything we've seen previously.”

Greengart said there absolutely is no question Apple was a tremendous catalyst for the touch-screen phenomenon, even though other touch-screens were on the market or in the works concurrent with the iPhone's launch. One such company, Taiwan-based mobile handset-maker HTC, released the HTC Touch — featuring its underlying touch-screen technology, TouchFLO — weeks before the iPhone last year. In the U.S., Sprint launched HTC's touch-screen phone via its Mogul handset in October.

But the iPhone remains the best-known and best-implemented example of a touch-screen — one that is second to none, Greengart said.

“With the iPhone's core user interface, you push that home button and all the things you can do are right in front of you — any buried application or buried functionality,” he said. “That is one of the exciting things about the iPhone. Then there are other aspects of using touch to do things you couldn't do before like physically flip through photos and scrolling down Internet pages.”

As user interfaces (UIs) become more sophisticated a la Apple, tactile UIs are taking hold around the world. In Asia, South Korea's LG and Samsung have been duking it out to make their local markets fully touch-screen-enabled. Earlier this month, Samsung said it would commercialize full touch-screen phones this month. The prototype, SCH-W420, includes a 3.2-inch LCD screen, terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting service support and a 2 megapixel camera.

In the U.S., the i760 — available through Verizon — is Samsung's flagship touch-screen phone. Rival LG's Voyager entered the market amid hype that it would be an iPhone killer, sporting both a touch-screen and a qwerty keyboard. Its UI offers sensory feedback in the form of subtle vibrations linked to touches of the screen. Most recently, Alltel released the LG Glimmer with a slide-out keypad and touch-screen interface.

As the world's largest handset-maker, Nokia still trails Apple, HTC, LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson as the last manufacturer to introduce a touch-screen, but it plans to release its version in the second half of this year.

Unlike its larger competitors, Motorola is focused on ModeShift, a technology it calls a move beyond the touch-screen. Set to deploy this year in its inaugural handset, the ROKR E8, ModeShift shows a blank interface that displays traditional buttons for phone calls, which disappear when the phone is in camera or imaging mode. The result is an uncluttered UI. Like LG's Voyager and KF-700 phone, the ROKR E8 uses haptics to provide the tactile click that mimics a keyboard.

Dickon Issacs, Americas design manager for Motorola, said this is one of the technologies Motorola is focused on for its future devices. The important thing, he said, is to meet consumers' changing needs for a wireless device that is simple to use regardless of how complex the technology is behind it.

“All the manufacturers of handsets are looking for ways to deliver new experiences,” Issacs said. “There is more of a prevalence of the need for multimedia, whether that is carrying music with you or even carrying video clips with you that you maybe downloaded off the Web and watch on your commute to work. There is a need for these devices now to be much more than a phone.”

Greengart likened the ROKR E8 to a universal remote in which some buttons light up for certain modes and others light up for other modes. It is not a bitmap-addressable screen and, as such, won't compete for the same market as Apple.

“That is an attractive product, but it's going to be competing for a different audience — and it's going to be competing based on price rather than competing as an end-all, be-all smartphone, which is what the iPhone has done,” he said.

Apple also set the bar high with its advertising, Greengart said, keeping its advertisements simple, instructive and, most importantly, hype-free. Touch-screens are a different class of product, he said, and it's important the customer knows that.

“It is certainly more than just something that is nice to have,” Greengart said. “If it is implemented properly, a strong user interface affects how you can do anything with that phone.”