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.