Despite the mutterings that the Society for Information Display’s Display Week, being held next week in San Antonio, will have a significantly reduced number of exhibitors and attendees this year, my schedule of interviews, discussions, demonstrations, and booth tours is only moderately less intense than usual. As I look over that schedule, one thing that stands out is the number of touch-screen developers and vendors who have reached out to me prior to the show.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

Among these are Stantum (multi-touch technology), NextWindow (multi-touch for displays as large as 120"), Fujitsu Components (improved five-wire resistive and organic conductive polymer touch screens), 3M Touch Systems (projected capacitive technology, 19-inch developer kit, 10-finger multi-touch), and Ocular Display Systems (projected capacitive, with focus on eBook user interfaces).

This is consistent with the boom in touch-screen phones kicked off by the dramatic success of Apple’s iPhone. (Yes, Palm was first with its Treo phones, but they never broke out of the business smart-phone niche, and Apple established the economic viability of capacitive touch for personal electronic products.) In addition, plans to incorporate touch interfaces on some Netbooks and integrated support for multi-touch in Windows 7 promises to extend h-volume touch to larger screens. In a recently released report, DisplaySearch projects the touch-screen market will grow from $3.6B in 2008 to $9B in 2015.

Samsung Mobile Devices (SMD), a new division that includes the small-OLED-display
segment of Samsung SDI, is focusing on combining OLED displays with touch screens for mobile handsets, including the recently released Samsung I7500 Android-based phone for the European market. And SMD will be one of Nokia’s OLED suppliers. Samsung predicts that more than half of its smart phones will feature the combination of OLED and multi-touch in the future. LG has also introduced phones with this combination of technologies.

SMD is bullish about the smart phone market. It sees the market increasing from about 170M units in 2009 to 500M in 2012, and sees the segment growing from 14% of total handset sales in 2009 to 29% in 2012. More generally, SMD predicts that 50% of displays used in mobile handsets, digital still cameras, GPS devices, and digital media players will have touch by 2012.

No wonder that the people exhibiting touch screens during Display Week want their messages to be heard–and touched. That is a pretty big pie and they all want a piece of it.