Touch for IT Takes off in Computex?

By Calvin Hsieh – Research Director, DisplaySearch

We saw touch application as a hot topic in Computex last week. Windows 7 supports multi-touch, so lots of IT field players have joined or planned to step into touch. However, the longer term influence to the industry will extend beyond Windows 7 release.

Touch is being used for two distinct kinds of business. One is portable consumer electronics such as mobile phone, PND or portable game console, and the other one is vertical and commercial applications ranging from ATMs to POS to touch-enabled electronic white boards. IT applications are rare and not so critical. But now with Windows 7 touch support, touch will extend to notebook PCs and desktop monitors, and it brings a great opportunity to Taiwan, which has been the most competitive region in IT OEM/ODM manufacturing.

We saw many mini-notes, notebooks and PCs with Windows 7 installed for users to try multi-touch on the track pad or panel. The Acer Timeline series CULV notebook has a driver to support multi-touch with Vista on the track pad.

Resistive, projected capacitive, infrared and acoustic were prominent at Computex, but optical imaging similar to the NextWindow solution has become more visible. Many makers presented large-area modules for vertical, commercial or IT applications.

In Hall 3, we saw Nlighten demonstrating successfully adoption of optical imaging for multi-touch on sizes from 32″ to 50″. The applications are interactive advertising, multimedia education title, information kiosk, painting and so on. We saw a simulation of a chemical experiment running in the Windows environment on a TV-sized screen. Large touch screens are conventionally used for education and training in classrooms or meeting rooms, but it could be in our home living room or study room in the future. Consumers still won’t touch their TV while watching programs, but it will be convenient to use touch to if their TV-sized display is used for children’s education or a widget channel for information through the internet.

IC suppliers had coverage for touch panels, touch pads and touch buttons. It seemed many IC suppliers would like to take advantage of touch fever to promote themselves. Touch buttons cannot necessarily replace physical switches, but touch panels and touch pads are quite promising for IT products. ELAN, who was located in a small booth of Hall 1, had some surprises. Besides a controller IC smaller than 5 × 5 mm to be used for mobile phones and notebook PCs, they presented some new ideas. We saw some interesting remote controllers. One of them has two sides-a normal keypad design on one side and a track pad on the other-to be used for controlling either internet TV or a Windows PC. Also, there’s a remote controller which has a small screen with other keypads; the screen can change its user interface for different media sources.

What we felt from Computex is that the boundary between IT and CE has been disappearing in our lives, and touch applications seem to be extending to more consumer-oriented products besides its vertical uses. In our new Touch Panel Market Analysis, we found the touch penetration in IT product (notebook PC and desktop PC) was still very low in 2008; however, we forecast decent growth of touch in these applications in the next several years.