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" During his keynote address at last year&amp;#039;s MacWorld expo, Steve Jobs pulled out of his pocket a palm-size pill that&amp;#039;s given the tech world a mobile gadget hangover ever since. From that moment all the way through last week&amp;#039;s Consumer Electronics Show and up until this week&amp;#039;s MacWorld, we&amp;#039;ve seen the debuts of new MP3 players, cellphones and everything in between. But not a single one has really managed to turn a single head. Apple&amp;#039;s iPhone, it seems, has lapped the field. This is made worse by the fact that, rather than attempting to put out products that improve upon the iPhone&amp;#039;s many weaknesses, many companies have spent the past year playing catch-up, releasing phones that look more black market rip-off than stock market hit. While we&amp;#039;ll have to wait until Jobs&amp;#039; MacWorld keynote on Tuesday to know for sure what updates he has planned for the iPhone, we can take a look at some of the past year&amp;#039;s attempts to chase Apple--a feat that&amp;#039;s most often attempted by simply slapping a touchscreen on a piece of plastic. Still, a close look reveals that many of Apple&amp;#039;s competitors have not seemed to notice that the iPhone&amp;#039;s appeal is not rooted in a touchscreen (something Treos have had for years), so much as a forgiving and intuitive user experience.     RELATED STORIES \u2022 MACWORLD: Complete Coverage for Apple Geeks  \u2022 CES: Hands-on Videos, Roundups and More  \u2022 LAB TEST: iPhone Tops 7 New Smartphones   HTC Touch Claim to Fame: The Impossible-to-Use iPhone While some companies are glory hogs, HTC has always been happy singing backup. The Taiwanese cellphone company is best known for putting out high-powered Windows Mobile phones that usually only bear the branding of their carriers (the T-Mobile Dash, for example.) So it&amp;#039;s mind-boggling to think that HTC chose this phone as one of the first to actually carry the company name. For thousands of consumers, this phone will be their first experience with the HTC brand, and its damage will likely be irreparable. This may be the single most user-unfriendly phone to ever get a mass release. Like the iPhone, it is virtually buttonless, relying instead on a touchscreen. Unlike the iPhone, however, its touchscreen is nearly impossible to use. Not only is the virtual keyboard so difficult to navigate that it can take upwards of 30 minutes to enter a simple email address (no joke: I review gadgets for a living, and it took me a half-hour to find all of the necessary characters), but the page layout seems to be completely random--the home screen is filled with tiny frames and windows that require impossibly precise scrolling. It&amp;#039;s as if this phone was rushed to market without any testing, and is as good an argument as any for more buttons.     RELATED STORIES \u2022 MACWORLD: Complete Coverage for Apple Geeks  \u2022 CES: Hands-on Videos, Roundups and More  \u2022 LAB TEST: iPhone Tops 7 New Smartphones   LG Voyager Claim to Fame: The iPhone With a Keyboard  One of the chief complaints against the iPhone is its lack of a physical keyboard--a deficiency that can make typing texts or emails difficult. With the Voyager, you can almost see the gears spinning in LG&amp;#039;s head: &amp;quot;What if we made a phone that had a keyboard and a large touchscreen?&amp;quot; Lucky for the South Korean company, it&amp;#039;s got phones such as the enV and the Rumor under their belt, so its designers have already mastered the art of hiding loads of keys in form factors that normally don&amp;#039;t feature full-QWERTY keypads. And the Voyager does just that, using a clamshell design to sneak a keyboard under a generous touchscreen. And while the Voyager is a very decent phone, its problem is that it is little more than a salve designed to keep iPhone-lusters from fleeing Verizon en masse to AT&amp;amp;amp;T. While the iPhone&amp;#039;s touchscreen is so tied to the user experience that it is impossible to imagine the product existing in another incarnation, the Voyager comes off as a tricked-out version of last year&amp;#039;s LG phones. Sure, it gets the job done, but you don&amp;#039;t really need the touchscreen to do it. And if there&amp;#039;s one thing the HTC Touch taught us, it&amp;#039;s that an unnecessary touchscreen is usually far worse than no touchscreen at all.     RELATED STORIES * MACWORLD: Complete Coverage for Apple Geeks  * CES: Hands-on Videos, Roundups and More  * LAB TEST: iPhone Tops 7 New Smartphones   Neonode N2 Claim to Fame: The Useless iPhone  This cute-as-a-button phone feels like a very expensive toy. In order to navigate the menus, you swipe your finger across the minute touchscreen. Unfortunately, this gesture-based control scheme often feels like it&amp;#039;s completely void of centralized logic. It&amp;#039;s often very difficult to figure out exactly which swipe brings you where, and you quickly find yourself longing for a &amp;quot;back&amp;quot; button. One of the advantages of a touchscreen is that it allows for larger displays. But this phone is so small that, even while relying on a touchscreen, the screen is far too small to get anything done. Sure, this Swedish phone will let you make calls, but so do old rotary phones and Zach Morris bricks. And for this price (it costs 440 Euros unlocked), you should expect a lot more than &amp;quot;cute.&amp;quot;  RELATED STORIES \u2022 MACWORLD: Complete Coverage for Apple Geeks  \u2022 CES: Hands-on Videos, Roundups and More  \u2022 LAB TEST: iPhone Tops 7 New Smartphones   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a2516/4244782/>