When Apple launched iPhone in June 2007, it indeed raised the bar for user interface in mobile phones and changed the rule of the game in consumer electronics. Apple iPhone’s mutli-touch screen user interface is so cool and captivating that it has catalyzed and spurred the accelerated adoption of multi-touch screen technology in consumer electronics markets, especially among the young people. Using intuitive and natural touch screen, keypads and buttons might soon be a thing in the past. Since the launch of iPhone, a couple of consumer electronics companies have introduced devices and gadgets with multi-touch screen feature. For examples, LG and Philips introduced a 52-inch multi-touch display during CeBit 2008. LG also launched a Window Mobile-based PDA phone,KS20, with multi touch screen feature. The market research company, iSuppli, predicts that global shipment revenue for leading touch-screen technologies will increase to $4.4 billion by 2012, up from $2.4 billion in 2006. Retail, kiosk, financial, e-book and medical applications are also adopting more touch-screen monitors to accommodate consumer preferences for intuitive and easy user interfaces, according to the study. (Ref)

I did some googling on the history of mulit-touch technology. Multi-touch has a history beginning in 1982, with pioneering work being done at the University of Toronto (multi-touch tablets) and Bell Labs (multi-touch screens). Later, the University of Delaware developed a sophisticated two-handed typing and gesture recognition system in the late 1990s. The first commercially available display using multi-touch technology was the Lemur Input Device, a professional multi-media controller from the French company JazzMutant, launched in 2005. (Ref)

In a surprising move, Nvidia launched its first CPU, APX 2500, for multimedia mobile phone 3 days ago. According to the press release, the APX 2500 is the world’s lowest power and high definition computer on a chip. It is designed to drive new 3D user interfaces and enable high-definition 720p video on connected Windows Mobile phones (Ref). A video of the APX 1200 powered smartphone is shown below.

The APX 2500 processor is based on 750MHz ARM11 MPCore with 16/32-bit LP-DDR and Flash support (Ref). It allows over 10 hours of high-definition video playback and up to 100 hours of audio, more than four times the audio playback of the latest touch-screen phones. Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said in the press release,

“This is the dawn of the second personal computer revolution. Technologies are converging in amazing mobile devices, that have all of the rich, visual capabilities of a modern PC—from watching movies and making video calls to surfing the web and playing 3D games. The APX 2500 combined with Microsoft® Windows Mobile, will make the next generation of smartphones our most personal computer.”

Nvidia is doing exceptionally well last year. Its fourth-quarter net earnings rose 57% to $257 million, or 42 cents a share (Ref). The stellar performance of Nvidia has fueled rumors such as the possible acquisition of the battered AMD (Ref). However, I would think this is quite unlikely since this would imply the acquisition of AMD’s ATI graphics business unit as well and that would probably run against the antitrust law in US.