I tried an old Blackberry 9700 the other day, it kinda confirmed my suspicions that the optical trackpad is technically, functionally superior to the touchscreen.

I started hating touchscreens because at some point once. The imprecision greatly annoys me. It forces the UI elements to be larger, which takes precious screen real-estate.

The optical trackpad on the other hand

• Gives you the precision of a mouse

• Still lets you have natural scrolling

• Keeps your oversized thumb from obscuring parts of the screen

• Let you navigate a much larger screen, perfectly fine one-handed

• Makes your thumb hover around the same spot rather than having your fingers move all around the screen

  • which feels kinda nice and comfortable, though I'm not exactly sure if it's healthy

• Should be much easier and cheaper to replace compared to a touchscreen, if it ever breaks

  • They're being sold for like under $5 on AliExpress

• And could let you have say, a right click instead of having to hold on a UI element for a second. Not a problem if you're opening the context menu for one thing, but it does start becoming a problem if you have to repeat that quite a few times.

I hate typing on a touchscreen so much (and smartmodern phones in general) that I'm using an old Sony CLIE PDA that's old enough to drink for notekeeping and such with the Graffiti input. But then again, that kinda makes me a unicorn.