Breakthroughs often beget other breakthroughs, and Apple’s slick use of touch technology on its iPhone has set touch-screen makers to salivating. An industry once relegated to niches now sees the potential for riches.

The market for touch screens has grown quietly for years, both in commercial applications like restaurant point-of-sale systems, credit card signature readers or automated teller machines, and in consumer devices like global positioning systems and video game platforms.

But touch screens have not created much excitement as the main way for public to use things like phones or computers or other consumer electronics — until now.

“Apple changed everybody’s mind about touch,” said Geoff Walker, global director of product management at Tyco Electronics’ Elo TouchSystems unit, a big seller of touch screens. That iPhone users can so easily resize photos with just a pinch or a flick of their fingertips is “supercool,” he says.

In specific, Apple changed minds about what is called

multitouch technology. A multitouch screen is precisely what it sounds like: a screen that can accept input from multiple touches at once.

Apple uses multitouch screens in which a slight electrical charge reacts to the human body’s own electrical field, rather than pressure.

There are other kinds of multitouch technologies, but all are among the more expensive types of touch technology, industry observers say. High prices had caused multitouch to languish before the introduction of the iPhone.

But the success of the iPhone has encouraged other companies to adopt multitouch screens. It might follow that whether society like using their fingers on the screen of a cell phone, they would like it even better on the bigger displays of computers.

That is the hope of N-trig — pronounced “intrigue” — an eight- year-old Israeli company that makes a multitouch screen that can be used with a pen as well a…

Original post by dhiram