New technologies . Who actually creates every new thing ?

In the mobile phone industry , new technologies are developed , standardized and become commercially available all the time . Bigger screens , faster processors etc . Who actually develops each new thing is sometimes more complicated that just looking at who brought it to market first .

Everything new , has some important steps that it has to go through before it actually reaches the market .

First of all there must be a company having the required technology , resources , money , time and of course personnel to be able to research , develop and then make something new available . 

Almost all other requirements except money are translated to... money since each one of them either requires  money to get , or costs money , like time . 

Each new technology or product must also have a potential audience , a market where it can be sold in quantities large enough to cover it's overall cost and of course make some more money for the company that created it . 

So far everything seems and is rather simple , but it gets more complicated further down the road . 

The actual phone makers are in some cases at least just the buyer of new technologies of any kind .

This means that when for example HTC build the original Desire , they had to rely on Samsung to provide them with the AMOLED screens in order to actually build the phone . HTC was the one using the technology , and Samsung was the one that spent the money needed to create them , build them and then sell them to HTC . Apple is another example . When iPhone 4 was first presented to the world it was rightfully praised for it's high density screen . Apple had to find a company that could actually design and build this screen , and without one , Apple's willing to use a screen of this kind would mean absolutely nothing .

What makes things more complicated is when a phone maker requires something new in order to differentiate it self from the others , knows exactly what he wants and just needs someone to make it .

Finding a company that can do just that is not so simple . 

The actual phone maker has to be able to absorb enough quantities of the new product , and make use of it in mobile phones , in order to be able to pay the price of it's development to the company that will actually make the product . 

There are also cases of companies that have created some new technology with one of the above mentioned ways , and their product is something that phone makes do want , but the company is unable to create it in quantities large enough to satisfy the phone maker/makers needs . 

When the 3rd iPad was developed , the screen's manufacturing had to be outsourced to Samsung , not because Samsung had anything to do with it's design and development but merely because they were the only ones that could actually produce it . 

In the same way Qualcomm closed a deal with Samsung to manufacture their components , because TSMC was not able to produce them in quantities large enough for Qualcomm to cater all it's clients . Qualcomm actually went to one of it's competitors and paid him to also manufacture it's own products . 

(Exynos SoC's are creations of Samsung Semiconductors and not Samsung Mobile )

Some companies in some cases are forced to keep developing newer technologies with their own resources and money , even without having not even one potential customer , simply because in some technology areas you must always keep developing something new to stay competitive .

This is one of the reason's Texas Instruments is trying to expand beyond mobile phones with their OMAP platform , because it's ongoing development was not met with the orders needed to justify the cost . 

Yes , this is not the end of course , not even by far , since there are of course some companies that build mobile phones that actually develop their own new technologies in some areas . 

Samsung is a prime example of this , since they design , develop build and then use their own screens , and SoC's , and are even tryimg to design their own Radio IC's . At the same time they also choose solutions from other companies like NVidia and Qualcomm , either because their own production capabilities are not enough to cover their own needs or simply because their own products are more expensive than the market segment on which some mobile phones are designed to fit .

At the time Samsung was making the Galaxy S II , their manufacturing capabilities were not big enough to yield enough units in order to use them in more products . Their first two tablets based on Android 3.x Honeycomb had to be based on Nvidia's Tegra 2 SoC (also because Google hadn't made the source code available to be used on different hardware ) and some mid range tablets after that were based on Texas Instruments solutions for this reason and because the Exynos 4210 and 4212 cost more money to make .

Samsung at the same time proved an exception in another field , when they invested even more money in new facilities able to make AMOLED panels , in order not to sell them to someone but to be able to use them in more of their own products and to be able to meet the higher demand for their existing and future ones . 

Finally , nothing of this makes the work of the phone maker any easier . Regardless of who actually builds everything , it's the phone maker that has to take each component , fit them all together and create the final product as a mobile phone or a tablet . Choosing the right components , depending on their performance , cost or even ease of integration is no easy task . The design of the final product also requires a lot of development with everything tailored to the needs of every device , and all of that takes even more time , resources and money .

This is the reason why in most cases , each new technology is used in a final product a long time after it has become available from the company that created it . This time gap is getting smaller nowdays , but only at the cost of more money on the phone makers side and sadly in some cases at the cost of the final product's quality .

There are numerous examples that fit to one of there categories and this is probably not the place to deal with each one of them . 

The next time each one of us buys one new product and our decision is based on this product's potentially new feature that we like , we should wonder who is actually responsible for it's creation , or to put it more correctly , if the company that sells the final product is the only one that we have to thank for it .