How did touch-screen phones replace keyboard phones and become popular around the world?

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If we want to explore the meaning of Jobs changing the world, it is not the iPhone itself, but the fact that he provided a new way of using mobile phones through the iPhone. The iPhone itself is excellent, but the price and other factors of this product have prevented it from occupying all consumer markets; instead, we see a world where mobile phones with many different mobile operating systems such as Android, iOS, and Windows Phone coexist.

However, almost all mobile phones in this world have one thing in common: they are touch-screen phones.

Yes, touch can be said to be a basic feature of the smart phone era that Jobs pioneered. Feature phones, elderly phones, some Symbian phones that are still on the market, and even their knockoffs, still exist in this world with keyboard operation; but they have been pushed to the edge of the mobile phone stage. And the ones that really shine on the stage are those touch phones equipped with different operating systems. It is strange that these mobile phones have different brands, different application ecosystems, different interface styles, and different interaction logics, but they have rarely reached a consensus on the basic feature of using touch operation.

It can be said that Jobs brought the touch phone to the world and made most people in the world accept it. People are immersed in the pleasure of the new mobile phone operation experience and can't extricate themselves; just tap with your finger and you can see the reaction of the mobile phone interface; everyone, including mobile phone manufacturers, has joined the touch world.

So, why do people like to use touch phones?

Zero distance from content

From a more fundamental perspective, a mobile phone is a tool; and the meaning of a tool to us is that we can complete certain tasks by operating it. Just as we need to use chopsticks to pick up food to eat, comb our hair, and use a pen to write, we need to operate our mobile phones to complete functions such as making calls, sending text messages, and surfing the Internet. In other words, the direct relationship between us and many tools, including mobile phones, is operation; but due to the different tasks to be completed, our operation methods are also different.

Before the touch-screen smartphones we use today became popular around the world, we operated our phones using buttons. Whether it was moving up, down, left, or right, confirming or deleting options, or inputting numbers and text, all of these operations required us to input commands through the phone buttons, which were then fed back to the phone, and finally displayed on the phone screen. In other words, during the entire process of operating the phone, if we want to control the content on the screen, we must do so through buttons; in fact, the content on the screen itself is the most important part of the entire phone operation for us; we can see it, but we cannot control it directly with our hands, because there is an unavoidable process in between: the keyboard.

With touch-screen phones, we no longer need to use a keyboard to interact with the content on the phone screen. We can touch the screen directly with our hands, and the screen itself can get instructions and directly respond. This operating mechanism gives people the feeling that we are directly interacting with the content on the screen, without the need for an intermediary; we feel that this phone is closer to us and therefore more intelligent.

Here we use a metaphor that is not quite appropriate but more vivid: using a keyboard to operate a mobile phone is like eating with chopsticks, while using a touch-screen mobile phone is like eating with your hands directly; excluding the hygiene factor, it is obviously simpler and more direct to eat with your hands directly. Of course, for using a touch-screen mobile phone, we will inevitably leave fingerprints on the screen, but compared with the directness and convenience brought by touch operation, everyone no longer cares.

Sublimation of Operation

This actually involves the question of operation mode. Simply put, if it is a keyboard phone, all our operations can only be a mechanical action: pressing with fingers. This operation mode has only one advantage over touch operation: that is, accurate feedback; this is why when we need to input a lot of text, the keyboard is more efficient than touch.

However, since we don’t often use a lot of text input when operating a mobile phone, the above advantages are not enough to make people stick to using keyboard phones. Especially when touch-screen smartphones appeared, the disadvantages of key operation were exposed:

Monotonous, hopelessly monotonous, all commands can only be completed by a single press, dozens of buttons lying there, waiting for us to press them over and over again with our fingers;

A basic feature of physical keyboards is that we must press down to issue commands, which means that we have to use external force on the keys, so every time we press, our whole hand is actually exerting force. Therefore, in the era of keypad phones, we often feel sore thumbs after using the phone for a period of time, which is due to this reason. In addition, under some quiet conditions, the keys will make a sound when pressed.

If it is a touch screen phone, the situation will be very different:

Touch screen provides us with multiple operation modes. The most common ones are single-touch, double-touch, and free sliding in four directions, and sliding in the opposite direction from the upper and lower edges of the screen. In addition, due to the multi-touch characteristics of mobile phone products, we can zoom in and out pictures by touching the screen with two fingers together or apart. Obviously, compared with the monotonous keyboard operation, touch screen operation is more colorful, more vivid and flexible, which greatly increases the playability of mobile phones.

Touch control itself is a simpler feedback mechanism. As long as we touch the screen with our fingers, we can get feedback; therefore, in this process, our hands do not need to exert force, so we will not feel tired after long-term use, and there will be no sound. Therefore, the operation will make people feel more intimate, more friendly, and more natural.

Therefore, from the perspective of operation method, touch screen operation is much superior to button operation in many aspects; this is also an important reason why people prefer touch-screen phones.

A richer and clearer world

In fact, mobile phones have been facing the problem of screens since their birth. Especially when people have given their mobile phones more and more functions, from sending text messages, taking photos, watching videos, playing games, and later various applications and games, the content that needs to be displayed on the screen has increased in quantity and complexity. This has put higher requirements on the quality and size of mobile phone screens.

In the era of buttons, the most common mobile phone styles are: candy bar, flip and slide. The front of a candy bar phone is divided into two parts: the screen and the keyboard. The existence of the keyboard greatly limits the size of the screen and greatly reduces the screen-to-body ratio. As a result, the content that can be displayed on the phone screen is severely restricted. It is precisely because of this that flip and slide phones appeared to make up for the lack of small screen size. But even so, the screen size of Nokia's most popular flagship phone N96 in 2009 was only 2.8 inches.

Today's touch-screen phones started with the 3.5-inch screens of the previous generations of iPhones, then to the 6.3-inch screen that Samsung pioneered on the i9200, and then to the 4.5-inch to 5.5-inch screens that many mobile phone manufacturers are converging on. After getting rid of the constraints of the keyboard, mobile phones have opened up a larger space in size, making it easier to present content and more in line with the requirements of the mobile Internet era.

Of course, along with the increase in screen size, the resolution of touch-screen phones has also increased rapidly, starting from the 329PPi retina screen of the iPhone 4 that amazed the world, and now even reaching the 2K screen era. In the era of delicate, exquisite and bright touch-screen phones, people can no longer tolerate the eye-worn pixel particles on keyboard phones. If smartphones have created a colorful mobile Internet world for us, then it is the touch screen that makes everything in this world clearer and more beautiful.

other

In fact, touch-screen phones are becoming more and more accepted by the world, which is the inevitable result of people's lives changing with the development of technology. Key-button phones have indeed made contributions to people, but the arrival of touch-screen phones is an irreversible trend after all, because no matter from which angle, the experience of touch-screen phones is much better than that of mobile phones.

The greatness of Jobs is that he saw this trend in advance, and then pioneered it through the iPhone, and shaped it from the specific implementation method, setting a benchmark for the industry. Therefore, we can see that even if there are many niche operating systems that want to break the current mobile operating system pattern dominated by iOS and Android, they all choose touch screens in the operating system interface without exception.

There is actually another benefit of touch-screen phones: they are becoming more and more refined in design, more and more rounded in feel, and more and more integrated in shape. They are increasingly transcending the tool attributes of the feature phone era and becoming a work of art. In short, they are becoming more and more beautiful.

The pursuit of beauty is human instinct.