Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Tale of Full Touch Screens

Vidit Bhargava
It came with the iPhone in the business phones category, now every single company in India produces these 'fancy' Smart Phones.

When the iPhone was announced in 2007, the first reviews were like..."Dude, Full Touch Screens? Where is my Keyboard?"..."No Stylus? You're Kidding right?"..."This will eventually prove to be the downfall of Apple"..."The software lacks some basic features, its just a fancy over hyped device"

The reviews had no base, and hence, proved to be wrong. However, this is not the point. The point is today we see 10s and 1000s of full touch screen devices flooding the market and all of them have almost similar taglines. They've all removed the Stylus from their backs. A new category of devices has come across which provides music and apps with the touch of a finger but do they have any quality which makes us buy them? Except the 'TASHAN' factor nothing impresses us, though.

What I'm trying to say is that today we a floury of devices, they get rave reviews from Tech Shows and become instant hits but are these devices any different from each other? We always get one or the same thing packed in different 'mobile OS', They provide us with grids of icons of applications on your home screen. The bottom of the screen is followed with one or two fancy keys, nothing else. No uniqueness in the mobile. Just the same old features.

The reason why these phones are like these is just because they're trend followers. Not the trend setters. Most companies today don't want to take the extra risk of providing some thing evidently new. I'm not saying every body should start re-inventing stuff but provide something which forces us to buy the device at the moment nothing does.

The E series from Nokia has got the same looks and features of a Blackberry of course though on Different OS. Corby, HTC Touch, etc... look more or less similar to each other in features as well as design.

The full touch devices neither provide healthy touch screens, nor do they give any thing new in the hands of the user. I find them all the same.

However, we must not forget to appreciate the silver lining in this cloud. We've at least got some people who think a little differently, Widgets and working widgets being added to the mobile phone where to me a very good step which is taken by many today. Also not to forget Android, Its quite unique in its way, every company can have their customized version of the OS. Thats absolutely awesome.

So my wish is we see something new. Something that doesn't come in any other phone. Something thought of and then made. Until then we have no use of the wide variety of the colorful fancy phones hanging on the Mobile Shop near you. iPhone rules this industry even now.

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