"The mercenaries will always beat the draftees, but the volunteers will crush them both." - Chuck Noll, as quoted by Tony Dungy in "Uncommon"

It's been a while since the last Sophie-tech, so to review, I have a three year-old daughter, and when she was born it brought about a thought: she was born into an era of unprecedented technology growth - the first time I interfaced with a computer was around the fifth grade, the first time she did was via the monitoring before she was born - and I thought it would be good to observe how she naturally grows into what I have to adapt into via an occasional series.  This one has to do with smartphones.

Despite all the visions of handset-less smart communicators, embedded networking chips and all the other sci-fi thoughtwork, our production usage smartphones now involve basically two types of user interface - the keyboard and the touchscreen.  I'm discounting voice commands for now, since there are none currently in wide-spread use that are anywhere close enough to be able to be accurate. 

Sophie's reactions -

Risk: this is the child who dialed 9-1-1 on my previous cell phone,  so she's already known to be a button afficionado, and she maintains that consistently.  The risk of her dialing the emergency number is reduced on the button-based interface, but only because there are a lot of buttons.  On the touch screen interface she was able to wreak a new and different kind of havoc, because everywhere you touch there's a click and something happens.  She managed to fill my screen with icons and make a couple of calls to random contacts.

Rewards: This one was surprising. Smartphones with touchscreens specialize in providing large splashy and colorful graphics, so you'd assume that interface would be the toddler's choice.  You'd be wrong,  as I was.  Sophie prefers the buttons of the keyboard to the larger screen. She seems to somehow derive value from the tactile feedback of feeling the button go down.

Verdict: touchscreens come in second place.

How is that possible?  I'll put my 2 cents worth.  As humans we enjoy having our senses engaged when we do things.  If we listen to music we like to see pictures - hence MTV, at least before unreality TV.  If we eat a meal at a restaurant, we like to see the flames leap up as the fire brings the aroma out of the steaks.

A touchscreen is very sensitive,  and due to the way it works you can accidentally do a large number of things with an errant swipe, or by remaining too long on one area. 

The button-centric design isn't as flexible, but provides feedback and a greater degree of control.  There is no approximate with a keypad.

I actually prefer the touchscreen for its resolution and the flexibility, but there is an underlying nod toward the need to engage more than just the eyes - the haptic response. Even the hybrids that use both are providing the two ways because there is not a clearly superior method. This one boils down to preferences and not really on the technology. It looks like two methods are here to stay, at least until the augmented reality implants with linkage to the nervous system.