The Rise of Buttonless Phones?

By Allan Pulga

People used to get excited about technology that did away with wires or cords. Nowadays – with so much buzz surrounding buttonless devices like the Apple iPhone, the LG Prada, and even the Nintendo Wii – it appears a new frontier in state-of-the-art user interfaces is being explored.

In a BusinessWeek ‘Special Report,’ released on Monday, Olga Kharif investigated the new phenomenon of touch-screen technology incorporated in cellphone design. She called the iPhone and the LG Prada “only the tip of the touch-screen iceberg.” Even TV remotes, MP3 players and global position systems (GPS), she writes, will be undergoing a similar transformation.

Stuart Robinson, a director with Strategy Analytics consulting firm, estimates that by 2012, 40 per cent of the world’s cellphones will feature touch screens, compared with only 3 per cent today.

One of the main reasons touch-screen technology has come to the fore is the related advancement of software and microchip technology. Developments from big software players like Apple and Microsoft (who recently released Windows Vista operating system) and chipmakers like Intel and AMD have allowed for more options in “input interface” – where the external display and keypad are used to control a device, explains Kharif.

Even IBM is in on the game. The company’s ShapeWriter technology allows users to type on a touch screen by smoothly pointing out each letter of a word and lifting a finger off the screen to indicate the end of the word. Software then matches the pattern traced from letter to letter with that in a dictionary database.

Personally, I think cellphone manufacturers will have to work very hard to convince the masses that snazzy touch-screen technology, although smooth and attractive, is actually easier to use than a keypad. The potential for widespread acceptance is certainly there, but it’s going to take a lot more than looks and feel for the touch-screen cellphone to go mainstream, particularly if the iPhone ($500-$600 U.S.) or LG Prada ($700) costs two to three times more than a conventional handset.