ConsumerIT - For Europe's High Volume PC Retailers, Distributors & Builders

Touchscreen demand is on the rise, according to DisplaySeach-- with WW touch panel module revenues forecast to reach $13.4Bn by 2011's end, before reaching totals of $23.6Bn in 2017.

Fuelling such growth is the rapid growth in mobile phone, handheld games console and tablet screens accounting for more than $10.5Bn in revenue this year.

Demand is also growing in devices requiring larger touch-based displays, such as all-in-one PCs, notebooks and gaming machines.

Capacitative displays are the current touchscreen leader-- with DisplaySearch estimating WW growth of over 100% Y-o-Y for 2011 and revenues accounting for 70% of all touchscreen revenues.

More companies are moving towards producing projected capcitative displays-- including several colour filter suppliers and LCD manufacturers. Currently over 60 companies supply capacitative displays.

DisplaySearch also expects in-cell touch displays to take off next year, once yield rates improve, together with other technologies such as combination-type panels.

Mobile phone remain the major application for touchscreens accounting for over 66% of unit shipments-- with DisplaySearch forecasts reaching 868m units and 68% Y-o-Y growth for 20011.

Tablet screens are also to show strong growth, with shipments forecast to reach 72m units in 2011-- up from 2010's 26m-- and revenues to reach over $1Bn.

The most successful touch-based technologies have a number of common factors-- high transmittance, low power consumption and multi-touch (if not gesture) recognition.

Go Displaysearch 2011 Touch Panel Market Analysis

The IDC reports WW tablet sales are slowing down-- with unit shipments for Q1 2011 reaching 7.2m, a 28% decline from Q4 2010.

Such a decline follows seasonal trends typical to more mature CE and computing categories. The WW eReader market also feels similar seasonality, with shipments going through such a similar decline and reaching 3.3m units.

The eReader market also shows Y-o-Y growth of 105% in Q1 2011 (Y-o-Y growth figures for tablets are not yet available).

The analyst still predicts growth for both markets' 2011-- with shipments forecasts reaching 53.5m for tablets and 16.2m for eReaders (a 24% increase over 2010).

Apple's tablets continue dominating the market, even if IDC decribe Apple's Q1 2011 shipments as "well below expectations". Other vendors find the quest for market acceptance more difficult, even if the market share for Android-based devices grows to 34% (an increase of 8.2% from Q4 2011).

When it comes to eReaders, Barnes & Nobles' Nook beats the Amazon Kindle for the first time, no doubt thanks to its colour screen.

Go IDC Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet and eReader Tracker

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and TraQline say 2011 is "the year of the consumer" at the CEA Research Summit-- as customers now have the power (and the technology) to find the retailers offering best products at the best prices.

The organisations' consumer survey shows the 3 main factors leading to one's choice of retailer-- competitive pricing, previous store experience and good product selection.

Amazon-- now celebrating its 12th year in the business-- comes on top in the 3 areas, with Walmart, Target and Best Buy following.

The online retailer now also ranks as the 4th-largest CE retailer-- just behind Best Buy, Walmart and Apple, thanks to its increased "consumer empowerment", according to the CEA.

Adding to this, in a way brick and mortar retailers are serving as Amazons' "showrooms", where consumers increasingly check out products at chain stores before doing their purchases online.

What should retailers do in the face of such competition? The CEA suggests the embracing the social media trend (the "connected bandwagon"), building relationships with customers online by allowing the pre-purchase checking of pricing and products online.

Go CEA

Go TraQline

In their paper for IEEE's International Memory Workshop, you can read the excitement between the lines at IBM about their prototype multilevel cell phase-change memory (MLC PCM) chip.

Phase-change memory (PCM) is not as fast as DRAM, but IBM says it's 100X faster at reading and writing data than flash memory. IBM doesn't expect PCM to replace DRAM, which can read and write data much more quickly. But PCM could boost DRAM performance by caching data for fast access when it's needed.

For the server applications IBM has in mind, improvements in multilevel storage and drift tolerance should make PCM competitive in 2016, say the IBM Research authors.

IBM's main application, being in the server business, is enterprise storage and memory applications. In the consumer market, the most important attribute is cost per bit. In enterprise applications, speed is more important because PCM will sit close to the main memory where there are lots of transactions per second. And endurance must come with the speed as the device must read and write with industrial strength.

For example, flash memory in the server market in the form of SSDs offer significant performance increases but they're more expensive and usually wear out as data is read and written over and over. Flash degrades at about 30,000 write cycles for business-grade storage products and PCM can endure at least 10 million write cycles, IBM says.

IBM won't actually make these phase-change memory chips, but they will license the technology.

Go IBM Research Zurich