fine...fine!

If you know me well, then you'd know that I'm a staunch critic of touch screens, and have been especially slow to adopt it as a mainstream user interface for phones, computers, and most recently, cameras. My arguments? With the absence of a keyboard or buttons to press, I can never seem to press the right button. Plus, touch screens are harder to maintain and clean, since they're prone to getting our finger prints all over them. But criticisms due to my fat greasy fingers aside, I agree with this PC Mag article that all-touch interfaces actually disables the functions of one of our 5 senses: touch.

I'm so sorry, I couldn't help it.

The author argues that all-touch interfaces are actually touch-less screens. As humans, we use our hands to use tools that feel tangible. We can touch and feel a pencil in our hand, we can touch and feel the keys on the keyboard as we type. When you touch a "button" on an iPhone, you feel nothing. In the author's words, "every button feels the same: nothing. Every action feels the same: nothing."

And it's true, essentially, we've given up our sense of touch since when we're actually "touching" our screens on our phones, we don't actually feel anything. We can't operate our phones purely by touching it anymore. We become dependent on our senses of sight and sound as well in order to operate our "touch"-screens (and another thing! I can't blind text with a touch screen! That means alot less texting while driving for me!...well...not that I do that. In this state, at least.)

So with all these arguments and hate on the all-touch interface, I guess you could I'm the last person you'd expect to own a touchscreen phone.

The blog I'm writing at the moment is in the background of the picture. Now that's ironic.

Yes, I do realize the irony of the fact that I'm the proud owner of an HTC Droid Eris, the closest thing to an iPhone you'll find nowadays (Verizon, you owe me one for that shameless plug). It's only a recent development, and two weeks later, I'm still far from getting used to typing on a digital keyboard (if you text me often enough, you may have noticed my text typos have become rampant as of late). But this still doesn't change my stance on touchscreens (they're still the devil to me! kinda), and I though there's nothing intrinsically wrong with them, I don't believe in the trend that every device nowadays needs to be a touch-only interface. I mean, come on:

Okay, maybe that is pretty awesome.

"e-bony? what's that?"
-JL