Touchscreen will shape smartphone market

The touchscreen form factor is slated to take over as the design of choice throughout the smartphone market during the next several years, according to a new report from ABI Research.

The firm recently announced that it believes the touchscreen, which is already widely used for the Android-based devices and the iPhone, will account for 93 percent of devices on the market by 2016. Five years ago, just 6 percent of smartphones featured touchscreens.

"It was the evolution of screen and touch technologies that triggered the [smartphone] market’s rapid growth," ABI claimed in its report. "The more economical resistive touch technology has been almost universally replaced in smartphones with the more elegant projected capacitive technology that was first introduced in mobile phones through the iPhone."

In addition to demand from mobile users, a drop in the cost of components and manufacturing of touchscreens will also drive the trend, according to the report.

Overall, the market share for Android-based devices continues to grow, as a new report from the NPD Group revealed that Google's mobile OS accounted for 52 percent of the market in the second quarter.