Touched by the Hand

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Touch screen technology - a solution waiting for a problem.

I tried it two years ago when I got a new phone. It was sleek, powerful, and an absolute pig to operate. After three days I took it back to the shop and swapped it for one with lower specifications - crappy camera, no ebook reading facility, very limited video viewing, sort-of but not-really MMS ability.

But it was actually usable, and the lack of such 'selling points' as mp3 ringtones, secondary camera and en-suite video editing wasn't an issue because, well, what kind of person buys a phone because it can play last months chart-topper instead of ringing?

However, that contract has nearly expired so...I've got a new one. With QWERTY keyboard for writing my novel, android apps for mapreading, and a 5 megapixel camera that can shoot video at 720x480 and 30 frames per second. In other words...DVD!

It's a frelling camera phone, and it can make movies of up to 2 hours in domestic DVD quality. Or rather it could...if it had a good quality lens. Is it me, or is that combination of overkill and cheap design a bit mad?

This new phone can read PDFs, and other ebook formats. It's got a second camera facing me so I can put video diaries on Youtube. There's an option to upload photos to Flikr immediately upon taking them...before I even review them. Whose idea was that?

It's got a special dedicated button for connecting to bloody Facebook. That alone speaks volumes about what the designers think about and of the target audience.

The battery life is two days - one third of my old phone. Oh, and it's got possibly the naffest name of any phone ever: The Cha Cha. Yes.



All of which I can happily live with. But the touchscreen aspect isn't as peripheral as the advertising copy suggested. It's absolutely central, and there's almost no keyboard alternative - which would be usually faster.

Imagine your computer didn't have a mouse, but you clicked and moved things by putting on a boxing glove and rubbing it around the screen. Gloves aren't precise, so to click anything you need to keep dabbing at the screen until it decides you've hit the right spot. And then you drag a slider up or down to where you want it, except you have to guess because you can't see the slider because...the fucking glove's in the way.

Look, technology doesn't advance by identifying problems and finding solutions. It advances by finding new things it can do, and then casting about for applications.

X-rays weren't discovered by someone looking for ways to diagnose bone fractures - they were a mysterious new wave that got beamed at anything and everything to see what happened, for decades. It was marketed as everything from a baldness cure to a replacement for the telegraph.

Nuclear fission still doesn't have a safe application, but it's still being pushed as an expensive and risky way to run steam turbines. If you think nuclear energy is green, ask yourself what infrastructure it relies on.

Electricity was a lab-bound curiosity for decades. Now we're so reliant in it, civilisation would collapse without it.

You can now get laptops with touchscreen capability - the new super gee-wiz version of the mouse. The one that doesn't work as well as the mouse, and gives you different, worse types of repetitive strain injury.

I've watched software engineers wax lyrical about how touchscreen will enable users to interact with the computers in whole new ways. But they never, ever, speculate what these new ways might be.

Hey, maybe there are uses for touchscreen that keyboards, speech recognition, Kinect, tracker balls and mouses (mice, meese, moose) can't do. There's just been no sign of them yet.



As for my new handset, it's got a full keyboard which might come in handy, occasionally useful apps, a pretty good camera, and I can read miniature books on it.

For everything else - music and audiobooks, battery life and, erm, talking to people on the phone, the old handset is actually superior. So I'll probably be moving the sim card over to it, having effectively signed a two year contract and got a free micro-palmtop.

Oh, and the old handset I bought two years ago: it was obsolete at the time.

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