The death of the non-touch smartphone

I had a chat with a friend this morning. She is not a geek by any stretch and uses a BlackBerry 9300 Curve 3G. Yep; the phone pictured below.

It is a smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard. She loves and enjoys the keyboard. She told me that she was getting bored already and would love to get a new smartphone. She was looking at Android. And Samsung. I thought it was a good move.

Then she dropped the spoiler: she didn’t want a touchscreen smartphone. She finds touchscreen devices difficult to use, she said. They require too much attention and concentration to use, she said. Simply put, she wants a non-touchscreen smartphone.

The non-touch smartphone is an Extinct Specie

It may not have dawned on you yet, but I do not know of any smartphone that was released this year 2011 that does not sport a touchscreen. Not one. The last non-touchscreen device on any smartphone platform was launched last year, 2010. You read that right. My facts may be a bit off, but if I am right, that would be the Blackberry 9780 in November 2010.

The E6 launched with a QWERTY keyboard this year has a touchscreen display. I mentioned that to her. She declined. If it had touchscreen, she didn’t want to hear of it, so I didn’t bother with any of the new BlackBerry or Android QWERTY devices.

The New Age
But the reality is, she will have to adjust if she wants to use a smartphone. I had to adjust, though my preference lies with non-touch QWERTY too. Many others have had to adjust. Let’s call it the evolution of the smartphone and the adaptation of humanity. Adapt or go extinct.

My first pure touchscreen device was the Samsung S8003 Jet back in January 2010. It was a non-smartphone marketed as “smarter than a smartphone”. The touchscreen experience wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Today, I use another pure touchscreen device as my primary smartphone, the Nokia N8. It is not terrible, but I miss my QWERTY keyboard.

One thing is for sure, whether it is with or without a hardware QWERTY keyboard, we are in the age of the touchscreen.

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