Its been long since I wrote anything... But that does not mean that I was not thinking, or I did not had any topics in my mind. More than anything else my main concern was, if at all anybody is reading my blog or not? and if at all it is useful for anybody... But nevertheless, I will still continue the my work...
I bought a touch screen phone a few days back. Its 5800 xpressMusic phone. I am not going to write phone review here. Its a nice phone, nicely balanced around price and functionality. Before deciding about this phone, I always wondered if touchscreen can replace/compete/outperform physical button based interface or not. Well, here is my answer to that.
Buttons are good to perform really fast actions like gaming and texting. And believe me there is no match to buttons. They are simply great, when looked from shear speed perspective. However touchscreen has its own advantages. Some of them are workarounds and not really answers.
On touchscreen usually you get the luxury of typing in full QUERTY mode or half QUERTY mode. Though speed might be slower than typical T9 button speed, its still comparable. Especially so in India because, while texting we many times use hindi/native language/abbriviations. These are really hard to type with multitap. So here touchscreen comes to the rescue. My take is, touchscreen is not a that bad option either.
Gaming, well here physical keypad wins. But having touchscreen exposes some totally new perspective for gaming, and makes playing a few games much more enjoyable. For example, playing sudoku or battleship on touchscreen is amazing. No irritating key presses in succession. In case of games, which require fast user input, though are difficult to enjoy. For example, tetris or snake at higher levels becomes boring. It might be challenging, as still you might struggle to keep the pace, but overall things are slower.
Another thing to note here is, on TS your finger/stylus touches the screen and blocks the view. Especially for gaming this is irritating. However sometimes you get the privilege of random access(as you can directly jump from one place to another) and hence you can do things faster than normal keypad.
Browsing, GPS, calculator like 'jumpy' applications, typing URLs, choosing from n options is very straightforward on touchscreen.
Finally, I would say that touchscreen is slightly more productive in general. Also touchscreens are really big, but there is limitation on size of screen for normal keypad based phone. Phone cannot grow beyond 8in x 5in and some place is always need to be reserved for keypad. Hence total screen area is ALWAYS smaller on keypad based phone. And having more screen area is much more advantageous.
I cannot comment about durability, but here I think physical keypad would win. For all practicle purposes though touchscreen might not fail either...
Closing comments, I would also like to comment about capacitive verses resistive touchscreens. 5800 uses resistive and omnipresent iPhone uses capacitive. Here too, in the long run I feel that resistive screen is better option. And always stylus should be bundled with any touchscreen based phone.
Capacitive touchscreens are more responsive, make no mistake about that. But resistive are not that bad either. After getting used to it, its not a that big deal. Just while tapping you need to use your fingernails, its more about getting used to it. Arguably resistive are more durable. Stylus is a must as viewing web pages, or playing games like sudoku is very easy with stylus. I wonder how it could be done efficiently without stylus. Even if screen is capacitive, when precise touching point is needed, there is no alternative for resistive screen.
So here too, I would say resistive touchscreens with stylus are preferable.
