The touchscreen is the heart of a modern, touch-based user experience. Using a touchscreen for all of your user interactions has many benefits over the traditional approach of physical buttons, keypads, and controls. With a touch screen, the look of the controls can be easily changed since they are just drawn onscreen. There is no need for tooling and paint to see your controls at work; instead, you can draw exactly what you want.  Additionally, there is no spatial limitation to the number of controls with a touch screen since more controls can be accessed through menus or other buttons. Another large benefit of having onscreen controls over physical ones is the ability to update the software on your device and effectively change any of the controls or add new ones. With physical switches and buttons, the entire device would have to be replaced to change the look or to add a switch. Moreover, touchscreens are more durable and are built to withstand hundreds of thousands of touch inputs. Touch screens are also easy to use and fast to respond to user commands.

The most popular touch technologies used today are capacitive touch screens and resistive touch screens. Capacitive touch screens detect the change in an electrical field on the surface of the device while resistive touch detects your finger—more like a traditional switch—when you press the screen.