Landrew Kentmore

When my roommate, Greg, pokes his girlfriend while they're watching TV, she reacts by saying "stop it" and then giggling like she doesn't want him to stop. I also respond to these pokes, by leaving the room. But if you poke a cell phone screen, it doesn't really do anything unless you have a touch-screen phone!

A touch-screen phone is kind of like if you combined the TV with the remote to the TV--it has the buttons and what the buttons make happen all in the same place! Except, unlike a TV, you can talk to it without people thinking you're weird! This probably sounds awesome, but touch-screen phones aren't for everyone. Before buying one, you need to consider if a touch screen is right for your lifestyle.

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Since you have to touch the screen all of the time, it's more important than ever to keep your fingers clean. This will probably not be a problem for a lot of people, but if you're someone who is constantly forgetting who you are and where you live so you need to go to the police station and get your fingerprints taken to get your name and address, you might want to consider a different kind of phone.

Also, most touch-screen phones have bigger screens than non-touch-screen phones. This may sound great for people with bad eyes, but consider this: the easier it is for you to see the screen, the easier it is for people around you to see it too. For example, let's say you have a ten-year-old niece that is really into girly stuff. One day, you finally start talking to a cute girl on the bus. Just when she starts smiling at you, your niece texts you a picture of her new doll. Now you have to choose whether to ignore it, which means being lame to your niece, or respond with something like, "This is awesome!" with your giant touch-screen phone right in front of the girl, who might read your message and think you're some sort of weird doll collector guy.

Since you don't want to damage the screen pressing down too hard, the buttons on touch screen phones don't need so much finger pressure. This can be a bit dangerous for people with certain hobbies. Imagine you're into bee-keeping. You check on your bees and everything seems fine, but then the bees start to get rowdy. You take out your phone to log onto the internet so you can search for how to calm down bees, but the bees keep dive-bombing your screen and messing everything up. Now you are in a really dangerous situation!

So touch-screen phones may seem like some totally cool new technology, but like everything, it will be replaced by something even cooler soon. Maybe they will make a think-screen phone, where you just need to think about something and it will come up on your phone. This could also be used to stop crime, because they could set it up where, whenever some guy thinks about stealing stuff or murdering somebody, his phone would call the police.