IPhone voted top mobile
The Apple iPhone was only launched in 2007 – but it has come top of a poll by the University of Salford on the UK’s favourite mobiles for the last 25 years.
The University of Salford polled over 2,000 respondents, where the Apple iPhone grabbed 13.5% of the vote to come top of our favourite mobile devices. The University found that the iPhone was regarded as a design classic, which has transformed the design of mobile phones.
The University believes that in three years time the majority of mobile devices will have touchscreens like the iPhone. The iPhone was launched in 2007 – with its large capacitive display – sparked a touchscreen arms race in high-end mobile devices. While touchscreen technology on mobiles predate the iPhone, Apple reinvigorated the concept by incorporating multitouch features into the iPhone.
Touchscreen devices will represent almost a third (27.4 per cent) of all mobile phone sales this year – up 96.8 per cent on 2009 – and will rise to 58 per cent of worldwide mobile sales by 2013, Gartner said.
The touchscreen takeover will be even more pronounced in mature markets such as Western Europe and North America, where the analyst predicts touch-sensitive screen tech will appear on more than 80 per cent of mobile shipped devices.
Both ‘finger-friendly’ capacitive and ’stylus-style’ resistive touchscreen tech will be found on phones in the short term, according to Gartner, however capacitive screens will be the “mainstream” touchscreen tech, with resistive displays filling a lower-cost niche.
Even so, Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, said touchscreen technology is pushing beyond the high end and filtering down into mid-tier devices too.
Cozza added that user interfaces are beginning to be “truly optimised for touch input”, and noted that touch UIs are being more deeply integrated into underlying mobile OS platforms – both key to unlocking the potential of touch tech.
