MONTREAL - Consumers have been voting with their fingers since Apple first introduced the iPhone, rapidly driving up the popularity of touchscreen smartphones, and the tide shows no sign of turning.
"It's a direct connection between you and the device," says PC Magazine mobile device analyst Sascha Segan.
It's psychologically powerful and also makes the smartphone's interface easier to use, Segan said from New York.
Touchscreens aren't new and have been around in some form for decades. Palm's personal digital assistant used a stylus on its touchscreen and was popular in the 1990s. There were touchscreen smartphones a decade ago.
So what did Apple do to make touchscreens take off when it debuted its first iPhone in 2007?
"Apple went for big touch targets and designed their phone to never have a stylus and to only be touched by your finger," says Segan, PC's managing editor for mobile.
"And that creates a much greater sense of personal connection and immediacy in the interface that people really took to at an emotional level."
Apple decided to use what's called capacitive technology, which reacts to a very light touch, instead of resistive technology, which requires a user to press downward on the screen, typically with a stylus, Segan says.
Even Research In Motion (TSX:RIM), famous for its thumb-typing keyboard, is focusing on incorporating touchscreens into its BlackBerry smartphones in response to market demand.
RIM already has models that include touchscreens such as the updated BlackBerry Bold and Torch. Its new generation of BlackBerry smartphones, slated for 2012, will have the same operating system as its PlayBook tablet and are expected to be completely finger friendly.
Smartphones running Google's Android operating system are touchscreen friendly and ABI Research is predicting 97 per cent of all smartphones will have touchscreens by 2016. Prior to the launch of the original iPhone four years ago, smartphones with touchscreens were a small percentage of the market, ABI notes.
This year, about 83 per cent of smartphones are expected to have touchscreens, predicts analyst Kevin Burden, vice-president of mobile devices at the U.S.-based tech research firm.
"It has almost made shopping for phones somewhat bland," he offers from Oyster Bay, N.Y..
"Now every phone ends up looking like an iPhone, which is causing another problem for manufacturers. How do they differentiate their phones on the store shelf when everything looks like a black slate?"
Burden says some smartphones are starting to come out with two touchscreens and manufacturers are trying to find other ways to make theirs stand out.
The screen is the most expensive component in a mobile phone, which is why it takes so long for screen technology to evolve and make its way into phones, he adds.
Analyst Carmi Levy says touchscreen technology popularized by Apple means that consumers can use smartphones without any special knowledge.
"That was a gamechanger because it meant that the smartphone was no longer the domain of the technologically savvy," says Levy, an independent technology analyst based in London, Ont..
"It's the domain of everybody. No technical knowledge required."
But touchscreen smartphones aren't always practical, especially for text entry.
"The downside is that typing on glass is far inferior to typing on a well-engineered keyboard," says Levy.
Considering all of the functions that smartphones have -- everything from streaming video, listening to Internet radio, programming a digital video recorder, getting an electronic boarding pass for a flight as well as phone calls, emails and texting -- the small device wouldn't have enough room for all of the necessary buttons.
"If you have a touchscreen, you can create an infinite number of different buttons that appear and disappear and flip between different modes," says Segan, "so you don't need a gigantic physical keyboard."
What does a young consumer think?
For 12-year-old Amanda, a touchscreen is "easier than buttons," which seem outdated to her.
"They're probably going to get rid of the buttons sooner or later," she says.
