I found this press release to be somewhat ironic...

Touchscreen Mobile Phone Adoption Grows at Blistering Pace in U.S. During Past Year

About three or four years ago, I remember looking at the then growing prominience of Windows Mobile phones and noting with some disappointment that Microsoft seemed to be abandoning their touchscreen smartphone platform in favor of the non-touch BlacKBerry-like thumb keyboard platform. This made sense in a world dominated by RIM's BlacKBerry and Nokia's S60 non-touchscreen smartphones. Some of you might recall that the non-touch Standard Edition was the platform that got a graphical interface makeover when Windows Mobile 6.1 was released while the touchscreen platform was essentially ignored.

Non-touch keyboard oriented smartphones still have an important place in the mobile ecosystem and continues to see healthy growth in sales according to the data in the press release (63% in one year). But, touch screen devices led by the iPhone had spectacular growth: 159%.

The top 10 touchscreen device list in the release is even more interesting from a Microsoft Windows Mobile point of view. The iPhone is the clear #1 with 32.9 of the market for the quarter ending in August 2009. The first Windows Mobile based device is the Palm Treo at #5 with 6.5%. And, part of that figure probably belongs to the Palm OS version of that line. The only other Windows Mobile phone in the last comes in at #8, the HTC Touch, with a 3.3% share. It is, notably, beaten by the T-Mobile G1 (the first Android phone) wiht had 3.6% of the market. I also found it interesting that half of the phones in the last are high-end feature phones.