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Cellphone keypads: Goodbye 1-2-3, hello A-B-C
Goodbye, numeric cellphone keypads. You're going the way of the rotary dial. Touchscreens and QWERTY keyboards will take over from here, thank you.
At North America's largest cell phone trade show, CTIA Wireless 2009, held last week in Las Vegas, there were few new phones for the market that had a numerical keypad instead of an alphabetic keyboard. Touchscreens also were out in force.
These changes are a recognition of the popularity of text messaging and wireless Internet use. Industry organisation CTIA Wireless, which hosts the show, said US subscribers sent 1 trillion text messages last year, three times the 2007 volume. Meanwhile, the same people used 2,2 trillion minutes of voice calls, an increase of less than 5%.
This shift in how people use their mobile devices has overturned cell phone design. According to NPD Group, 31% of phones sold in US stores in the fourth quarter of 2008 had full-alphabet keyboards, up from 5% two years earlier.
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