The era of touchscreens has finally begun, as more than half of all smartphones sold globally now have a touchscreen interface rather than a physical keypad, according to a recent report conducted by market analyst Canalys.The report found that all smartphone vendors have shipped a record number of touchscreen devices in the fourth quarter of 2009. Of the 54.5 million smartphones sold during the quarter, 55 percent (almost 30 million units) were touch-based. This represents an impressive 138 percent increase year on year, compared to overall smartphone shipment growth of 41 percent.
For the whole year of 2009, a total of 166 million smartphones were shipped worldwide, including over 75 million touchscreen devices, which is more than twice as much as the 2008 figure.
According to Canalys, Apple continues to dominate the touchscreen arena in 2009, shipping 25.1 million iPhones and accounting for 33.1 percent of the market. Nevertheless, the PC and handset vendor has lost some share to Nokia over the past year, who saw a tremendous growth of 4170 percent in the sales of its touch-enabled handsets, including the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and the N97. The Finnish manufacturer is now a very close second with 29.5 percent share of the market. HTC and Samsung trail behind with 10.2 percent and 6.4 percent share respectively.
In addition, based on the findings of another research by Canalys, 60 percent of the 4,000 consumers surveyed said they want a touchscreen model as their next cell phone. While some touch-enabled phone owners said they will switch back to a non-touch one, the analyst house still anticipates an overall shift toward touchscreens in 2010.
With the abilities to facilitate web browsing, photo viewing, game playing and so on, it is foreseeable that touchscreens will continue to prevail in not only smartphones, but also feature phones and other electronic devices in the near future.
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