We’re completely unsurprised that many of the new breed of touch screen phones remain unpopular and a piece of market research this week makes that official. The research comes from Reevoo.com and it shows that touch screen manufacturers are just not listening to their customers when they decide what to put in a new touch device.
Among the bottom ranked phones in a survey of 19,000 buyers of phones which bought 226 different devices, it turns out that 5 out of ten phones in the bottom ten were touch screens.
The bottom ten phones included the HTC Touch Diamond, the Samsung Armani, the BlackBerry Storm 9500, Samsung i900 Omnia and the Samsung F490, all touch screen phones ‘ then again somehow the new Nokia flagship Nokia N96 got into its bottom ten phones as well, which is perhaps even more worrying for Nokia, although we have reviewed it and found that it’s initial poor impressions are easily overcome when you get to know its good bits.
On the top ten devices only two are touch screens ‘ with the Apple iPhone rating as the top selling touch screen and the top phone overall being the Nokia Nokia 5220 Xpressmusic. The LG Renoir was the only other touch screen phone which made it into the top ten.
Reevoo.com said, ‘Manufacturers are keen to jump on the touch screen bandwagon but most of the current efforts are just not pushing the right buttons. Shoppers love the look of touch screen phones, and the ability to watch videos on a large screen, but they are hard to get right and many complain that touch screen interfaces are just too fiddly.”
Reviewers offered the following criticisms of current touch screen phones,
‘Touch screen is a little hard to use if your fingers are not slender and pointy.’
‘The ‘virtual’ keyboards are rubbish, takes ages to type anything…you could always employ a five year old with small fingers. They should have used a stylus.
‘Jerky software, not fluid. Crashes often.’
‘If you have nails can be a bit tricky on the keypad as it is heat sensitive and so must be pressed with the finger tip as a nail will not make it work.’
‘I found the touch screen hard work and the physical ‘pressing’ was made more difficult by the fact that your finger, however slim or fat, tends to ‘spread’ when you have to press.’
The best comment for us was one HTC Touch user who said the screen was so sensitive that when his ear touched it, it kept cutting him off mid-call. Now that’s bad design.