There are a number of smartphone form-factors nowadays, but in five years time candy bars with touch-screens will dominate the market due to the trend towards increase of screen sizes. However, devices with QWERTY keyboards will continue to exist. Meanwhile, the share of traditional candy bars and clamshells will erode.

“We forecast global smartphone sales with a full touchscreen to rise from 46 million units in 2009 to 355 million by 2015. Smartphone form factors have undergone a rapid period of transition in the past three years, switching from keypad-centric designs to slate designs with full touchscreens due to the success of the Apple iPhone. We expect that trend to continue for the foreseeable future," said Tom Kang, director at Strategy Analytics.

According to a forecast by Strategy Analytics, smartphone form factors will become increasingly dominated by touchscreen slate devices, representing 58.5% of the global market by 2015 with sales volumes of 354 million units. The other two form factors associated with greatest market volume for smartphones are expected to be monoblock QWERTYand slider QWERTY.

The forecast by Strategy Analytics seems to be quite logical. The reason for the forthcoming domination of touch-screen smartphones is necessity to see higher amount of information from screens. As a result, cell phones with smaller screens will become unpopular and so will be phones in clamshell form-factor. By contrast, devices with QWERTY keyboard will continue to be adopted by those, who need to type rapidly on their mobile devices.

“The surging growth in smartphones with full touchscreens will ultimately benefit all kinds of media companies, from content presenters like Disney, Electronic Arts and Netflix to Facebook and other social media sites. Larger, brighter touchscreens deliver richer user-experience for media consumers and enable them to extract greater value in accessing Internet browsing, social networking and mobile video,” said Martin Bradley, associate director at Strategy Analytics.

Considering the fact that smartphones are getting more and more popular and the fact that one day they will replace traditional cell phones, it is easy to predict that at a point in future phones with touchscreens will generally be the most popular.