I know this thread was started more than four years ago, but I have to say that, despite so much time, the problems haven't been solved at all, so, since I see some recent replies, I wanted to reply.
I've been using touchscreen based devices for a dozen years now: many of them were based on Windows Mobile.
Although being very old, when it comes to input devices they're still way much better than any Android or iGarbage...
I'm not talking about those (many) models featuring an hardware keyboard, I'm mainly talking about the different experience of using a modern touchscreen, which is just a rigid piece of glass, compared to the old style resistive type.
The former is sensitive to the "presence" of something that interferes with their field, and tries to "guess" where that object (which is supposed to be a finger) is.
Being meant to recognize fingers, which are not as small as a tip, and because of the technology used, they're not accurate at all. That's why everything is bigger on modern dumb-phones.
Resistive touchscreens, on the other hand, had a standard resolution of 4096x4096 (much greater than the display resolution on WM devices, which was usually 240x320), therefore it was possible to precisely select, and even drag, very small objects (for example, it was easy to resize a column on a spreadsheet), simultaneously allowing smaller screens (~3in) to show more items than a modern dumbphone.
There were mainly two disadvantages:
1. they were much easier to scratch, but also much cheaper to replace (<$4);
2. to be used quickly, they had to be operated using fingernails, therefore people suffering from nail biting syndrome were forced to use the stylus.
The great disadvantage of using an inaccurate touchscreen is even more noticeable when using touchscreen enabled netbooks, since, on a computer, things are still as small as they're supposed to be (and I hope they won't be changing this just because of the creepy fake touchscreen mac****tintosh decided to put on the market with their iGarbage)
Nowadays we're witnessing the return of the stylus in devices like the Galaxy Note or the Microsoft Surface: they use two different technologies, which bot differ from a standard capacitive touchscreen used on a normal dumbphone (being it based on android or ios), but they both require the stylus to be used to be accurate (they switch back to the inaccurate capacitive type when the users use their finger).
Anyway there's an even bigger problem with Android: not just the whole OS, but even its apps, have been designed to work with just the touchscreen. One can connect an external keyboard, but many things won't work... and the same is true when using Hacker's Keyboard (which is the only keyboard I use in the rare events when I use a dumbphone)
For example, using the arrows may easily cause some unwanted actions (like a page to reload on the browser), the Tab key rarely works, and many other things I don't even want to remember.
I personally gave up using Android and bought a netbook: I'm looking forward to seeing the death of nowadays mobile OSes and their replacement with desktop equivalents.
Android is like the Amiga computer, which helped bringing a decent computer, even better than an IBM PC, from some points of view, for a fraction of the price. Android did the same by cutting the hardware requirements instead of the costs, but now, thanks to the 14nm scaling down, technology can easily allow a standard OS to be run on a mobile device: I hope they'll also switch back to the resistive touchscreen, maybe overlapping two touchscreens (giving the users also the advantage to easily replace the resistive one, which would act as the protector for the capacitive TS)
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