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If there’s one thing in your house that you thought they’d never computerize, would it be a tap? Well, the guys at iHome have decided that a touchscreen tap with face recognition is the future in household gadgetry. I have to admit, this is pretty cool. The SmartFaucet recognises your face and then remembers exactly what water temperature and pressure you like. And if you get bored while you soak? Just use SmartFaucet to catch up on a few emails or find out how your calendar’s shaping up for the weekend.

[Electricpig]

As the pressure to create a phone as popular as the iPhone continues, manufacturers are just getting it wrong when it comes to touchscreens.

There are a multitude of touchscreen mobiles out there but only a few are actually pushing the right buttons with consumers. We looked into 19,000 reviews for 226 phones in the last 12 months to find out how they’d been rated by shoppers. In the bottom 10, a whopping 50% were touchscreens.

In contrast, only 2 of the top ten were touchscreen models. The top-rated phone with a score of 8.8 out of ten is the Nokia 5220 XpressMusic with a conventional key pad. Apple’s iPhone is the highest scoring touchscreen phone with a score of 8.3 out of ten.

Here’s a look at the top 10 mobiles, launched in the last 12 months, as rated by consumers

1.      Nokia 5220 XpressMusic

2.      Nokia E71

3.      Sony Ericsson W595

4.      Nokia 2680

5.      Nokia 3110 Classic

6.      Samsung M150

7.      Apple iPhone 3G 16GB - touchscreen

8.      LG KC910 Renoir - touchscreen

9.      Nokia 6600 Slide

10.    Nokia 3600

And the bottom 10

1.        HTC Touch Diamond - touchscreen

2.        Sony Ericsson T303

3.        Samsung Armani - touchscreen

4.        Sony Ericsson C702

5.        Nokia 6124 Classic

6.        BlackBerry Storm 9500 - touchscreen

7.        Samsung i900 Omnia - touchscreen

8.        Nokia N96

9.        Samsung U600

10.      Samsung F490 - touchscreen

And here’s what some reviewers are saying about touchscreens:

“Touchscreen is a little hard to use if your fingers are not slender and pointy.”

“The ‘virtual’ keyboards are rubbish, takes ages to type anything…you could always employ a five year old with small fingers. They should have used a stylus.”

“Jerky software, not fluid. Crashes often.”

“If you have nails can be a bit tricky on the keypad as it is heat sensitive and so must be pressed with the finger tip as a nail will not make it work.”

“I found the touchscreen hard work and the physical ‘pressing’ was made more difficult by the fact that your finger, however slim or fat, tends to ’spread’ when you have to press.”

So if any manufacturers are listening, take a look at some of the touchscreen reviews and address the issues shoppers have with current models.

Dick Tracy, eat your heart out. LG has come up with a futuristic treat from the past with the GD910 – a wrist watch phone. But if you thought it was going to be a second-rate mobile, it’s actually packed full of features you wouldn’t expect. There’s a pretty low-grade camera but its 3G HSDPA compatibility, 1.43” touchscreen, MP3 player and text to speech functionality makes it a decent phone and a pretty hot watch.

It also packs in bluetooth (so you can look even more spy-like with a headset), MMS and it’s water resistant. Want one? They’re due to be released in Europe later on this year.

Check it out in action:

Currently appearing in Coolest-Gadgets’ comp