>A touch screen is unavoidable for very small devices like mobile phones, but whenever any alternative is possible it is better. I have to disagree. I think as

>A touch screen is unavoidable for very small devices like mobile phones, but whenever any alternative is possible it is better. I have to disagree. I think as with any engineering challenge, it's about what tradeoffs work best for your specific application. If non-touch screens were better for the tablet application (that is a tablet in general, not any particular app on the phone), we would have stuck with physical keyboards and blackberry's roller ball, or the classic palm styluses or some other new pointer device. Yet here we are. Fruit Ninja was always possible with mouse or trackpads. And yet, it wasn't a thing until modern capacitive touch screens. Tellingly it has also only been ported to console applications where motion controls / VR is an option. Even something like a Wacom tablet. They've existed for years as external devices with none of the "obscuring your view" problems that having a touch screen has, and high degree point to point precision. And yet as soon as the Cintiqs and other touch screen versions of their drawing tablets appeared, most artists I knew switched or started saving to switch right away. And touch controls allow for the possibility of multiple simultaneous inputs, something that a track pad or stylus does not, so something like a software mixing board is clearly better experienced via a touch interface than a mouse and track pad. And that's not to say that you aren't right that there are applications where a touch interface is worse. For CAD/CAM where precise (and in many cases pixel perfect) movement is required? Something with a higher degree of precision than your average half inch meat stylus is going to be better. First Person Shooter games don't seem to have really made the transition to touch devices (other than with emulated joystick controllers), despite the fact that tapping on your target is going to be faster target acquisition than using a mouse. There's just something that doesn't translate into touch. A physical keyboard for typing input is leagues better than any touch screen keyboard I've tried. If you're at your desk, a track pad in front of you is worlds better than getting gorilla arm trying to work all your desktop mousing activities with your 30 inch touch screen. But I can't agree that one can make a universal statement that alternatives are always better if they are possible.