Sales of Touchscreen Handsets to Double in 2010

The market of touchscreen mobile devices is expected to top 362.7 million units in 2010, marking a 96.8 percent increase in sales when compared to 2009, when they reached 184.3 million units, a recent report from Gartner shows. Moreover, the touchscreen handsets are expected to account for 58 percent of all mobile devices sold in the world by 2013, and they should account for 80 percent of the sales in developed markets such as North America and Western Europe.

“Touchscreens are no longer the preserve of high-end devices and are now being included in many midrange phones as more companies have been driving the consumer market for affordable touchscreen phones,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner. “As phone capabilities increase, consumers are becoming much more aware of the benefits of touch interfaces, and vendors are responding.”

Handset vendors are focused on integrating touch technologies, and they are also moving towards delivering user interfaces that can offer optimizations for touch input, the report states. Moreover, mobile phone makers are also focused on “increasing their software skills” so as to provide a deeper integration of the user interfaces with the underlying platform, and do not consider only software overlays.

The viability of capacitive touch technology on mobile phones is also shown by the great success Apple's iPhone has registered on the market, since the solution “enables more-natural, responsive and intuitive gestures.” According to Gartner, capacitive and resistive touchscreen handsets will co-exist, but capacitive will become the mainstream technology.

CK Lu, research analyst at Gartner, notes that mobile phone makers will have to concentrate a lot on the experience they deliver to users, not only on the product “Consumers won't buy a mobile device purely for the touch UI. Touch technology is just an enabler, and ultimately, it is a compelling user experience - which includes good UI design, applications and services - that will make or break a product,” he states.