[wikfwikf]

I think the trend towards touchscreens has to do with the halo effect of the iphone. The fully touchscreen phone was much more modern-feeling, and also better and easier to use than previous phones with buttons.

The irony is of course that the decision to have very few buttons (not one, not zero, but very few) with almost all input via the screen was made very carefully by Apple with very specific justification based on understanding of how phones were used and could be used. This is clear from Jobs' iphone keynote.

If Steve Jobs, Jony Ives etc were redesigning car interfaces it's far from obvious that they would have made similar decisions.

[hulitu]

Physical buttons: 1. Are expensive 2. Need space on the PCB 3. Need ICT 4. Need special soldering sometimes 5. need a dedicated interrupt interface on the microcontroller ( that's why are more responsive) 6. Need software both at "kernel" (BSW) level and at userspace (application) level. A touchscreen "button" needs only a callback to a routine and a lot of patience from the user.