Portable consumer electronics products offering bigger, brighter, more colorful displays

• The Consumer Electronics Show 2005 (CES 2005) in Las Vegas featured a cornucopia of new handheld products that sported bigger, brighter and more colorful displays.
• Because of this, newer display technologies are emerging as major competitive differentiators in products such as MP3 players, digital still cameras and mobile phones, iSuppli believes.
• In advance of CES, Apple Computer continued to set the pace in the MP3/portable media player market with a new color-display version of its iPod portable music device.
• The company introduced its first iPod music player in 2001 and launched several succeeding generations of the product through 2004, all of which used high-quality 2-inch monochrome displays.
• This year, Apple showed the new-generation iPod photo, which features a 2-inch 65,000-color TFT-LCD display that can show photographs.
• Other companies arrived at CES hoping to outdo Apple by offering MP3 players that are capable of displaying video.
• Creative Labs and Archos introduced products at CES that incorporated 4-inch TFT-LCD displays capable of presenting movies or TV programs.
• The Zen Micro Photo employs a 1.5-inch, 262,000-color OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display.
• About 10 million MP3 players with hard disk drives were shipped in 2004, up more than 200% from 2003, according to iSuppli.
• Meanwhile, mobile phones are beginning to acquire much of the same functionality as MP3 players and also are adopting more high-end display technologies.
• As portable devices become more capable and as more functionality is built into them, customers are demanding bigger, brighter and more colorful displays.
• For system manufacturers, using attractive displays is an almost surefire way to sell their products and gain market share in these highly competitive, fast-moving markets.