With the touchscreen mobile phones becoming a rage among people, sales have been rising steadily for over a year now. A report from analysts forecasts that growth will become stronger and expects the number of sales, which was 30 million in 2007, will rise upto 230 million by 2012.

Recent reports and announcements from the three largest mobile phone manufacturers have highlighted a trend in the increased production of phones using touch technology. In July, LG revealed that it had sold 7 million touchscreen handsets. Samsung recently released the Instinct, a full touchscreen handset, through Sprint. Just one week after the launch, Sprint announced that the Instinct had already become the best selling EV-DO device in the carrier’s history. Not to be outdone, Apple reported selling 1 million of the new 3G iPhone handsets in just the first three days of its release.

According to analyst and report, the original iPhone was the catalyst that created this huge market interest in touchscreen phones. The fact that it was not only popular with consumers, but also helped drive data revenues proved how important touchscreen handsets can be. Now all of the network operators and handset manufacturers want a piece of the pie.

The impressive growtht that is predicting will not be driven solely by the smartphone segment either. according to the report Touchscreens & Input Technologies for Mobile Handsets, touchscreens will increasingly penetrate the much larger feature phone segment. In fact, Nokia just announced that its initial foray into the touchscreen market will be targeted at the “volume market” because that segment of the population is the largest consumer of mobile phones.

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