@MWC Worst of the Week: All touched out

BARCELONA, Spain — Hello!
And welcome to our Thursday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
So the word du jour for 2009 seems to be “touchscreen.” This is bad news because no one trusts me with anything related to touching.
Indeed, the whole touch thing appears to have smeared itself all over the Mobile World Congress show here, with Microsoft showing more touch support for its Windows Mobile operating system, LG announcing new touchable phones, and a Samsung executive proclaiming “people love touchscreen phones” after introducing — you guessed it — a bunch of new touchscreen phones.
I am personally touched to see so much discussion about touching, mainly because I like to touch things myself (primarily money and food), but I worry that some wireless executives are touched in the head. Because, in my experience, touchscreen phones are terrible.
Now, first, let me say that I do not have an iPhone. I have played with one on several occasions, and it seems to work just fine, so it may not suffer from the same problems I’ve had with other touchscreen devices. I just don’t know.
I have, however, tested a number of other touchscreen phones, including the Nokia 5800, the BlackBerry Storm, the LG Vu, the HTC Touch and the Samsung Glyde. Further, I have taken cursory tours through a number of other touchscreen phones, including those from Samsung and LG. I have found them to be universally annoying and difficult to use.
Why?
Well, first of all, I can never tell if I’ve accurately pressed a button. Sometimes I have and sometimes it requires another press. (Nokia’s 5800 is particularly annoying; some buttons require one press while others require two.) And oftentimes I press the wrong button, only to discover my mistake after the phone has moved to another screen.
The problem, as I see it, is due to a number of factors. First, some buttons on a touchscreen phone are simply too small. This is most noticeable inside the Web browser, which in most cases requires a user to constantly zoom in and out to click on miniscule links. Bad.
Second, most of the above listed phones have at least some kind of software lag, which means that you have to wait up to a second or longer before the phone’s user interface acknowledges your command. A similar lag is much less troublesome on regular, buttoned phones, because at least you know you’ve pressed a button.
Now, haptic feedback (that little vibration you feel when you press a button) was supposed to improve this situation, but it seems to be incorrectly executed across all of the phones I’ve tested. The phone will often vibrate, seemingly registering a touch, and then do nothing — which means either the haptic feedback does not actually indicate a touch or I’m crazy.
The third major problem with touchscreen phones is the increasingly complicated user interfaces designed for them. During Microsoft’s press conference here a few days ago, the company’s executives extolled the benefits of combining touch with Windows Mobile, showing how “intuitive” the navigation was. Such “intuitive” manipulation included moving icons around in ways I would have never thought of. Rather than innovative, this strikes me as an incredibly bad idea. If it would have never occurred to me to do that, what about a regular user who just pulled a touchscreen Windows Mobile phone out of the box?
I entertained the same thoughts while watching a Samsung executive struggle through the company’s touch-based user interface, dubbed TouchWhiz. At one point, another executive coached him on the manipulation of a particular icon: “You have to move it down and to the left.”
This is not something you want to hear when navigating basic cellphone functions.
And it seems I wasn’t the only one who noticed troubles at the Samsung booth. Cellphone enthusiast Web site Gizmodo put together a video of Samsung touchscreen bungles; click here to watch it. (In all fairness, Samsung’s phones are scheduled for release later this year, so the company may correct whatever bugs there may be between now and then.)
Now, I realize that these are big companies with smart employees who have invested a lot of money on touch technology, so there must be something to it. And I realize that it’s still early days, and the technology may well improve dramatically.
However, I suspect I’m not the only person who has had problems with touchscreen phones. And really, what’s so wrong with buttons?
OK! Enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this Worst of the Week column. And now, some special Mobile World Congress extras:
–I always enjoy traveling abroad, and I relish encountering new cultures and customs. But there seems to be a small group of people who live in Europe (at least, that’s where I’ve run into them) who seem to think it’s OK to push against the person in front of them while they’re waiting in line. So to those people I say: Stop pushing me. It’s a line. You need to be patient like everyone else. That’s how waiting in line works.
–The folks at the GSMA, Huawei and Vodafone were kind enough to loan me a Huawei E180 HSPA USB modem for my stay in Barcelona. The device is advertised as having a peak speed of 7.2 Mbps. However, repeated Internet speed tests showed my average speed at around 120 Kpbs. 120 Kpbs is very, very different than 7.2 Mbps. …I’m just sayin’.
–The people of Barcelona are universally beautiful, have excellent taste in footwear, and wear scarves, sweaters and jackets no matter how warm it is. Again, I’m just sayin’.
–I have officially dubbed Hall 6 at the Mobile World Congress as the Hall of Desolation. If you’ve visited it, you’ll know why.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at mdano@crain.com. Or, if you prefer, leave a comment in the space below.