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SANTA CLARA, Calif. – The first of the “Google phones” is controlled using a method that is finally gaining momentum in mobile computing: swiping a finger across the screen.
The touch sensors in T-Mobile’s G1 phone, which hits the market Oct. 23, are made by Synaptics Inc., a little-known but influential Silicon Valley company co-founded in 1986 by a professor and a microprocessor engineer.
For the two decades since, Synaptics has championed the finger as a navigation tool for computers. It develops many of the sensors behind laptop touch pads, digital media players and high-end remote controls.
But touch screens were rarely seen in cell phones until Apple Inc.’s iPhone hit the market in June 2007.
The Apple device lets users scroll through pages of text or photos and type on an on-screen keyboard with one finger, or expand or shrink files with two fingers.
Analysts who have taken apart the iPhone say they don’t believe that the Synaptics technology powers the innovative touch screen. Apple and Synaptics won’t say. But the device’s growing popularity helped Synaptics’ mission of bringing touch screens to the mainstream.
Over the past six months, the company has launched four phones with its touch-screen technology. And another one is coming soon: The G1, which is made by HTC Corp. and runs Google Inc.’s Android operating system for mobile phones.
Putting touch technology on cell phones wasn’t embraced at first. That has all changed, said Andrew Hsu, a product marketing manager at the company.
“Now we don’t have to go to customers and say, ‘You want to do this,’ ” he said.
The number of cell phones with touch screens is expected to nearly triple by 2010, to 362 million from 120 million in 2007, according to research firm iSuppli Corp. In comparison, cell phones without touch screens are expected to increase by 6 percent, to 1.12 billion from 1.05 billion.
Synaptics has hired 120 people since the beginning of 2008 to bring the total to 443, with new employees working on a variety of products, including mobile phones. Half of the employees have engineering backgrounds.
The company was co-founded by Carver Mead, a professor emeritus at California Institute of Technology, and Federico Faggin, a former Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corp. engineer who worked on the design of the first microprocessor.
Synaptics found its niche in the early 1990s when it supplied touch pads for laptops. In 2000, it sold touch technology for digital media players. As early as 2005, Synaptics put its touch technology in mobile phones. But it had trouble convincing cell phone manufacturers that a touch screen had benefits for customers.
