Why every mobile phone will have a touch screen by 2010

After using my Sony Ericsson G900 for a few weeks, it's time to make a bold statement:

By 2010, every mobile phone will have a touch screen.

Why? Basically because my G900's touch screen converted me from a "hm, a touch screen, that's probably toy stuff that nobody needs" mobile phone user to a "touch screen is essential" mobile phone user. Here are my impressions from using a touch screen in more detail:

1. Text on touch screen buttons is vastly superior to text above phone buttons. Let me guess: your phone, as almost all phones, has two or so general purpose buttons above the number pad that are mapped to "okay / cancel", "send / cancel", "menu / custom action", ... depending on what you currently do with your phone. There's text on the bottom of your mobile phone's screen that tells you what those buttons do. In the G900 (and probably every other touchscreen phone), this text looks and works like a button. Once you've used this touch screen buttons a few times and then you're actually forced to go back to an "old style" phone, the old mechanism feels awful, ancient, unbearable. Honestly.

2. Instant access to the secret meaning of strange little status icons. Do you have a reasonably feature-rich phone? Then you certainly have encountered the following situation a few times already: You look at your phone, and find a little icon in your status bar that you've never seen. You do not know what this icon does. It might be a reminder for something you don't konw. It might be a hint that an expensive/security-issue-prone/battery-eating feature of your phone is currently turned on. You see the icon, but you have no clue what to do to get rid of it. In other words: you're lost. Example: according to the user guide, my G900 has 24 different icons that might pop up on the status bar some day, probably a few hidden ones as well. I know maybe 10 of them, and I might guess from the icon maybe 5 others. That leaves 9 icons that would lead to confusion and irritation should they ever appear... But with a (well implemented) touch screen this is not an issue. In the G900, touching one of the icons will bring you to the right application. Touch the Bluetooth icon and you can turn off Bluetooth. Touch the message icon to get to your message inbox. This makes the status bar fundamentally more intuitive and usable than without touchscreen.

3. Well...

I could write about G900's handwriting recognition (which really is the toy that nobody needs), or I could write about the cool "scribble your notes with your stylus" functionality (another toy, although I actually use this a lot). I could write about how nice it is to just touch an appointment in the calendar to see more of it, and to "double touch" it to get to its details. But actually in real life the two features above are the true killer-features that cause me to state the bold statement about touch screens in 2010.