Despite the prominence of touchscreen smartphones, Nokia released the results of a poll that claims consumers prefer keyboards for input on their smartphones.
Nearly half of the respondents prefer a QWERTY keyboard while only a third prefer a touchscreen. Does this poll indicate a potential upside for RIM?
About two years ago, I asked:
Is RIM hedging its Blackberry bets to extinction?
By offering so many different models and user interfaces for the Blackberry, I wonder if RIM has created too fractured a marketplace for itself – is RIM playing it too safe for its own good?
A year ago, I wrote about data out of the UK that also seemed to be indicating a popularity for physical keyboards.
Personally, I prefer a real keyboard for data entry, but touchscreen for photos, media and web browsing. The Nokia blog acknowledged this: “The touchscreen is fantastic for looking at photos, browsing the web and watching video, but is it really that good for typing?”
There is a crowded marketplace for touchscreen devices. Will Nokia or RIM be able to recapture a sizable share of the market by effectively marrying a traditional physical keyboard with a high resolution touchscreen?
Judging at what happened to RIM when the iPhone came out, and judging how everyone else (HTC, Samsung etc) are adopting touch screen, I have to wonder whom they polled to get that data about preference for keyboard.
In terms of Nokia, it is interesting since its adopted parent (Microsoft) is also moving to touchscreen with its Metro and also developping its own touchscreen tablets.
The others side of the coin is that people want bigger screens, and this conflicts with replacing screen size with physical keyboard.
For RIM, assuming they really do intend to stay in business, having both a keyboard and touch screen devices would hedge its bets since it could be best-of-breed with a keyboard device to serve that part of the market, as well as have a touch screen one for the rest fo the market.