Parsing the touch-screen market

“Touch is more of a natural user interface,” Van Tilburg said. “Because it is more natural, it is easier – it lowers the amount of learning that is required to learn how to work the interface.”

Going forward, while touch screens will continue to proliferate, iPhone-inspired capacitive screens won’t be the majority. Burden cited research putting capacitive screens at 80% of all touch-screen phones in the next couple of years. In his opinion, there is no way this ideal could be achieved. The success of the iPhone and Android with superior touch-screen experiences has planted this seed, causing all handset manufacturers to aspire to this path, but especially with the economic climate, it won’t be the reality.

“It’s easy to buy into the hype of capacitive screens, since it was the iPhone and its touch screen the reenergized the mobile phone, so why wouldn’t you think that all future touch-screen phones will be capacitive based,” Burden said. “The reality is, look at it in terms of economics, capacitive is a lot more expensive. It won’t be the norm.”