Older touchscreen phones and PDA devices use older resitive touchscreen technology, whereby styluses and gloved fingers can activate the UI on the touchscreen.

The iPhone was not the first capacitive touchscreen device, but it did make finger-based mobile user interfaces mainstream and “cool.”

The challenge between user interface design for capacitive vs. resistive touchscreens, or finger-based vs. stylus-based UI, becomes immediately apparent when you look at the Palm Pre Classic emulator. The Classic emulator enables older Palm apps that you used to love on your Palm PDA run on your Palm Pre mobile phone. Except that it seems like no one realized until it was too late that older Palm apps assume a stylus input device (small tap target areas, particularly in the scroll bar area are usual) whereby the Palm Pre has a capacitive touchscreen and styluses cannot be used. Can your fat finger make your older Palm app scroll properly on your Palm Pre? Give it a try folks and let us know what you think.

The one thing that disappoints is that I have been using touchscreen phones for years (from Sony Ericsson) and am very used to very good handwriting recognition – which is a boon when it comes to sms or emails. Why can’t the current crop of smartphones adopt this obvious input method as well.

“iDon’t need to imitate” – well this is an imitation of the first ad (and the iPhone was by no means the first touchscreen phone – even Moto had one before Apple)

“iDon’t buy brands that bash other brands” – sounds like you don’t own a phone then. Certainly not Apple who are often bashing MS, Nokia, Palm (to the extent that they keep tweaking iTunes to stop the Pre from synchronising – how petty!)

The original iDon’t ad is actually pretty clever and highlights some iPhone deficiencies that even the most rapid fanboys will admit to (interestingly a recent user survey conducted in the UK listed physical qwerty keyboard as a strong requirement).

However when all is said and done, I let the products do the talking and right now, given the choice, I would plump for an iPhone

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