Touchscreens: who’s got it right and wrong…?

These days, seemingly not an hour goes by before another touchscreen device is announced (okay, it might not be hourly, but it does seem to happen quite often!). Yes, touchscreen has become de rigeur this year, and if you don’t have some mechanism to rub your equipment, then you just ain’t part of the cool crowd

Touch has been implemented in a plethora of ways since it appeared in the Ericsson Communicator device, YEARS ago – there were probably limited examples before this, but if there were, my brain cells long since disposed of them!

But in fact Touch was brought to the fore in recent years by the advent not of Touchscreen-only devices, but actually by the mass-market inception (in Mobile devices) of the original LG Chocolate. That had some kind of heat-sensitive softkeys, and Samsung quickly followed suit. (Much) later, Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) even put some of the same kind of keys on their “ok-ish” K850i.

But of course, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) were waiting in the wings, having spent a very long time getting touch working perfectly on the four generations of iPod they had released – and when they pulled the trigger on the iPhone, people couldn’t believe how accurate and sensitive the new touch experience was, compared to the likes of the WinMO Pocket-PC derivatives, and SE UIQ devices.

Of course, Apple have gone on to roaring success by twinning accurate touch with friendly-UI – a task I don’t believe any other touchscreen device vendor has yet achieved (by the way that’s a call to any and all touchscreen device manufacturers to send me your ‘excellent’ touch devices if you think you have one that cuts it). I played with the HTC Touch Pro recently, and was saddened by the need to have to get out the Stylus for example – I thought we had done away with those now!

Apple don’t have the market to themselves for Touch devices though – Samsung and LG are pushing hard in this space, and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is ready to enter – and these guys are bringing something else to the table – Haptic (vibrative) feedback. The idea is that you can replicate the feel of a physical key/button to some extent by vibrating the screen when it is touched. Basic implementations vibrate the whole screen; advanced implementations just the area where your finger made contact.

Quite what the next chapter of touch holds, no-one quite knows – but you can bet there are at least five BIG manufacturers working like crazy on getting the next device out there. I leave you with one final thought which is that it’s generally assumed it is your finger(s) doing the touching on the screen – but you wonder if people are experimenting with other bodyparts……

What is your favourite touch-enabled device? Let us know in the comments…