Mashable are running a poll to find out which user input device is most popular: Touchscreen or Mouse. When I posted my vote the mouse was blazing ahead, which seemed a little ironic to me.
I voted for touchscreen, of course. Anyone who has worked with me will tell you that I can't use a mouse; after a decade of using graphics tablets, I've got two left thumbs when it comes to mouse-wrangling. But that's not why I think touchscreens are great.
Although touchscreen devices have been around for a long time, they've always been quite clunky and unpredictable. Things have come a long way since then, and companies like Apple and Google have brought gesture-based touchscreen interaction into the public consciousness through world class implementation and user experience.
And this is the way it should be. We are tactile creatures after all; we don't naturally interact with the world around us through a proxy. We instinctively poke, prod and slide things around to manipulate our environment, which is why I believe touchscreens will play a very big part in our digital future.
They bring technology back to what makes us human, and create an intimacy in interaction that simply cannot be achieved using a mouse.
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