Touchscreen Cell Phones vs Keypad: Which is better?

There is a lot of excitement about touchscreen mobile phones in the market these days, and manufacturers are trying hard to meet the wants and expectations of the consumers. Though the iPhone can be blamed for all this frenzy, touchscreen phones have been around even earlier. The iPhone just took touchscreen mobiles to an all new level because of its multi-touch capabilities.
 
The consumer was so fascinated with what the iPhone had to showcase that he began to crave for it. However, in the midst of all of this we have lost the ability to reason out if it's a good choice or not. Shouldn't we be considering Touchscreen phones separately or for that matter any other phone, according to their input features rather than just a budget while buying it.
 
Upsides and downsides to Touchscreen and a Standard Keypad/QWERTY keypad. Why should one really take into consideration all these factors and how does it all directly or indirectly affect us? Hope this article will put things into perspective.

There are several types of phones; some plain and simple and some hybrid, while considering keypad and touchscreen input.
 
Standard keypad - I'll refer to this as Candy bar
Touchscreen phone
Combination Touchscreen & Keypad
Combination Touchscreen with QWERTY Keypad
Finally phones with standard screen and Full QWERTY

Standard Keypad Phones

Standard keypad phones are the best of the lot but only if your primary objective of having a phone is casual usage. If you find that your text input is taking much of your time then it's necessary that you've tried out T9. If you don't know about T9 then it'll be a miracle once you use T9, as it reduces the effort required and increases your text input rate.

This will also decrease the number of button presses, not just increasing the life of your phone's keypad but also saving your thumb a lot of stress. If you text a lot and it is causing you physical problems then you should be looking for another handset solution altogether. However, it's a misconception that such solutions are expensive. The Palm Centro is a phone that sells for quite a reasonable price and it's got a QWERTY keypad and the keys of the phone are made of a soft compound that increases typing comfort. 

Touchscreen Phones

Coming to touchscreen phones, the first problem you'll come across is that it doesn't have a keypad. This could make your text input slow. On the brighter side you can navigate faster, as you don't have to press a button several times to reach a point on the display, instead you just have to tap your finger.

But navigation through your phone is not what you will only be doing and hence back to text input. There is no kind of feedback. Touchscreen phones these days have haptic feedback much like a vibrating response to touch. Haptic response has to undergo a lot of advancement to give just the feedback only at the point of touch. Right now a complete vibration of the phone is as good as no response. Touching anywhere on the surface of the screen will send back a vibrating feedback.
 
Touchscreen phones these days have a QWERTY matt as well as handwriting inputs. Both of which are time consuming, as you have to make sure you hit the exact surface on the screen. For handwriting input you have to write in a particular fashion for it to register correctly, as there is no defined key that throws an immediate response. Touchscreen also have predictive T9 text but it's not so user-friendly.
 
One more thing that I'd like to bring to your notice is that, if it is a touchscreen it has to be a large screen and large screen means higher power consumption and repetitive charging. This in turn means half the usage of what a candy-bar can offer with a battery pack of similar rating.

Touchscreen & Keypad

Touchscreen phones with a proper keypad makes things just a tad better. It's because such phones will only prove good on the navigation side of things. The screen sizes of such phones are small and need a stylus or finger-nail tip for precise input, but it's a direct tap nonetheless.
 
As far as text input is concerned, such phones are better off than plain touchscreen phones, as the option of a keypad makes it possible to type and type faster with T9 activated than a plain and simple touchscreen phone. People who love texting should stay away from such handsets.
 
The presence of a touchscreen means the power usage of the device is high but depending on the size such phones mostly have, it won't be as much as a complete touchscreen. Such phones also end up being larger because of the incorporation of both touchscreen and keypad. It's a good combination but not perfectly driven for input.

Touchscreen with QWERTY keypad

It's a deadly combination providing the best of both worlds. But on the other hand they are large and really bulky. Reducing bulkiness would mean a compromise on either the size of touchscreen i.e. no need for a stylus, or compromise on a well spaced and laid out QWERTY.
 
Here text input is really fast because of the provision of a QWERTY and navigation is also simple because you can directly tap where you want to focus on the display. The problem here mainly comes with bulkiness of the device. Another thing to consider is that such handsets mostly incorporate a large screen and this means that the QWERTY placed under the screen suffers in size and layout.
 
Power consumption too is high because of the large screen, which is similar to the previous Touchscreen and Keypad combination phones, but here it is on the higher side.

Standard Screen Full QWERTY

This is texters' paradise. The full QWERTY keypad is great for typing. Texting messaging and staying on top of your game in the social networking circle will be a breeze. Navigation could be a bit of an issue, but with the coming about of the track-ball by RIM's Blackberry and the Optical Track pad should solve navigation problems in some of these kinds of handsets. Overall you could only be losing out on some time in navigation but this phone will help you type faster and more comfortably.
 
The weight of such phones is usually low and the size is comfortable to go dual-thumbing on the QWERTY. It's good to choose a wider QWERTY because it makes easy thumbing; with a cramped QWERTY you will end up being no better than the QWERTY keymatt on a touchscreen because of a lot of texting errors.

One more thing I'd like to add is that the missing touchscreen will reduce power consumption apart from the fact that it's not a touchscreen model. A similar screen size of a candy bar will do well here, with almost similar power consumption.