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Year: 2005
Products: iPhone

The secret of the touchscreen

Image: Motorola RAZR Caption: This phone almost brought Motorola’s mobile division back from the dead. The RAZR concept was a success that Nokia found difficult to match. It took Nokia by surprise in 2005.

One of the notable challenges that mobile phone developers had to solve was how to operate the phone while making it as small as possible. Nokia came up with the vision of a slide phone. It had been developing this vision since its first fiasco, when it had no answer to the series of flip phones produced by Motorola, and at one point it even looked like Motorola would successfully return to the mobile business thanks to the phenomenal response to the RAZR models.

Nokia prepared its own concept to reassure the market that it knew how to solve the control issue and that flip phones were no longer necessary; however, it happily continued to supply Asia, where nothing else could be sold at the time. It came up with a slide-out phone with a keyboard hidden under the display. This was the design innovation of the Nokia N95 and one of the reasons for the delay: Nokia had to fine-tune the slide-out keyboard so that customers would not complain about its unreliability.

To Nokia’s immense surprise, Apple dealt with a similar problem in a completely different way: with a touch-sensitive virtual keyboard on the display. In mid-2007, Nokia engineers were still dismissive of this solution, saying that something like this could not work on current displays. They knew exactly why: the market only offered pressure-sensitive touchscreens with low touch detection resolution and poor colors, which were distorted by the touch layer, and this was the main reason why phones running Windows Mobile 6 failed. This was also the reason why Symbian did not go down the touchscreen route; the necessary technology combining display, touch, and price did not exist. The solution chosen by the iPhone had to have a catch, because it could not be reliable, high-quality in resolution and color rendering, high-quality in touch response, and affordable on top of that.

It was only much later that the catch became apparent. Apple used its capital reserves and simply paid the supplier almost a billion dollars in advance to build a factory for capacitive displays. Their boom was blocked by the need to build expensive and completely new production capacity. Apple thus prepaid for the displays and had them available exclusively at a price that other companies could only dream of, because they were unable to pay for the construction of a factory for a single component in advance, as Apple did. Nokia would have been capable of doing so, but it apparently did not occur to them.

Apple took the same approach with memory, enabling it to offer a mobile phone assembled from key components that were not available to others on the market, or at least not at prices that would allow manufacturers to compete with Apple.

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