Before I begin, let me tell you that I love my Nokia 5800 XPressMusic. Its a very fine touch device. Its extremely feature rich and a delight to use. I admire the length Nokia and Symbian have gone to retain compatibility to older S60 versions, which is critical for application developers to easily port existing apps quickly on to the new S605th edition.
But my rant is not about Nokia’s and Symbian’s current strategy for touch devices. Its about all the brouhaha over touch screen phones nowadays. Its almost as if you are not a half-decent handset maker if you don’t have a touch device. Non touch devices have gone out of fashion. But I don’t think touch screen is the ultimate feature in mobile phones. Sure, its feels great to swipe your hand across the screen to get it to unlock but there are many use cases for the consumer where a touch screen is just not the right choice. Here are a few that come to my mind.
1. Battery – The power user expects the phone batteries to last for more than a few days. But touch screen phones, with large screens consume lot of battery power. We know the pathetic battery lives of the iPhone and the G1. They don’t even last a day. And haptic feedback is very power hungry. I have it turned off in my 5800 to gain a few more hours of battery life.
2. Writing Email, text or short notes using an on-screen keyboard is very cumbersome, to say the least. A full qwerty keyboard is still the best. And school kids love the number keypad.
3. Try a one handed operation on your touch device. Its not very elegant to reach across the screen using the thumb on an iPhone. On the 5800 XPressMusic, its great but there is another problem of not finding a key.
4. Try doing an action without looking at the screen, for e.g. picking up a call. It just doesn’t work and over several years, we have gotten used to receiving a call by pressing that green key in the most familiar location on the device.
5. Touch screen devices, with their large screens are far more expensive to make – low end users who only want to make phone calls and text won’t just bother.
6. Actions with just one or two clicks are effective on a touch screen; But anything more is a real pain. Try adding an address for a contact in the address book. Or try adding a calendar entry, say set the meeting to 7:45 PM. Not pleasant at all.
7. Accidental touch and activation or termination of apps and calls is inevitable. And its quite annoying. Sure this happens on other devices too but not as often as on a touch screen device.
But what’s a touch device great for?
1. Its great for consuming media – YouTube videos are great because of the large screen. I enjoy watching moves on my 5800 XPressMusic. It is a pretty decent experience. Browsing through my music collection or flicking through photos is nice, even without kinetic scrolling on the 5800 XPressMusic.
2. Games that use the accelerometer or respond to the touch input.
3. Browsing the mobile web is best experienced on a touch screen device – clicking through links with a touch is fantastic and multi-touch is quite amazing.
The Ovi store is abound with applications that use touch technology very well but don’t occupy you seriously for more than a hour, at most. They have an entertainment value and a wow factor but I haven’t seen any serious application that I’d use for more than just time-pass, which only suits best for a touch screen and not on any other device. I am excluding games here because a touch screen mobile device is probably the best platform for the casual gamer.
My view is that touch screen mobile devices of different form factors will occupy a decent percentage of the handset portfolio of every mobile device maker but will not be the only type of mobile device in future. There are still consumers out there, the non-geeks who just want to talk and text and read email.
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bad:
1. fair enough
2. thats crap
3. debatable
4. again a load of crap. i can do stuff from memory on my touch screen phone.
5. fair enough
6. load of crap again, i find it much easier to do stuff like what you said on a touch screen phone than on with an 0~9 *# key pad.
7. fair enough on old touch screen phones, but now most of them have a sensor that turns the screen off when you lift it to your face to make a call.