Over the past year, Immersion’s made some significant progress in getting its VibeTonz haptics technology into the hands of consumers. Today, more than 25 million phones have shipped with VibeTonz, according to the company. That's a huge leap from February, when - up to that point - only 10 million mobile phones with VibeTonz had been shipped by licensees.

The VibeTonz system lets manufacturers and content developers embed touch sensations to provide tactile confirmation of touch screen presses and enhance ringtones, music and mobile gaming. It extends tactile feedback way beyond the capabilities of your typical vibrating cell phone. With it, an application developer can - for instance, independently control both vibration strength and frequency.

Immersion's success has much to do with Apples success with the iPhone. The iPhone’s demonstrated just how capable and easy to use a touch screen could be with the right interface.

Since the release of the iPhone, touch input has made a huge, if unexpected, comeback. Until the iPhone, the growing popularity of QWERTY keyboards seemed to be sending the touch screen—which after all helped make PDAs, starting with the original Pilot, as popular as they were—out to pasture.

Some vendors, such as Samsung with the Instinct for Sprint, have used VibeTonz as way to differentiate their phones from the growing back of touch models. Its keyboard actually delivers touch feedback when you hit a key, for instance. With leading smartphone players RIM and Sprint, among others, about to enter the picture or already there (HTC with its Touch series, for instance), it’s a category that is only getting more competitive.

Additional phones to implement VibeTonz include the Prada, Voyager, Venus and Dare from LG and Samsung's Anycall "Haptic", Omnia and Soul.

Samsung Electronics introduced the first mobile phones to support touch feedback, the SPH-G1000 and SCH-G100, way back in 2005.