Research firm Gartner says that the worldwide market for mobile devices with touchscreens will grow over 97% in 2010.

Gartner predicts that the market will power over 362 million units this year; last year, consumers bought 184 million devices with touchscreens. According Gartner, by 2013 touchscreen mobile devices will account for 80% of all sales in North America and Europe.

Touchscreens are now on midrange phones, and more and more consumers are expecting their screens to be touch-enabled.

However, a touchscreen alone won't be enough to convince users to buy a specific phone.

According to Gartner analyst CK Lu:

"Consumers won't buy a mobile device purely for the touch UI, Touch technology is just an enabler, and ultimately, it is a compelling user experience – which includes good UI design, applications and services – that will make or break a product."

In fact, Gartner advised manufacturers to double down on their efforts to create good touch-driven UIs, a not-so-subtle reference to the iPhone’s impact on the market.

The mobile web...all about the shopping

As well, Frederic Lardinois of ReadWriteWeb has reported on a new report from mobile search engine Taptu that says the mobile web is currently “all about shopping and services”.

Taptu  surveyed about 326,000 sites that are optimized for mobile, finger-friendly browsing and found that the largest concentration of these sites falls into Taptu's "shopping and services" category. In total, Taptu found 83,000 mobile-enabled commerce sites, ranging from mobile shopping assistants to banks and mobile real estate sites.

According to Taptu, mobile shopping and services sites make up close to 25% of all mobile-friendly sites in the company's index, followed by sites in the "photo and design" category (17.7%). Social sites rank third with 9.2%. Personal blogs only make up 1.5% of Taptu's index, a number if is easily bested by adult sites, which account for 3% of all mobile-optimized sites.

Lardinois noted that “if we combine news and weather sites (3.3%) together with sites about world affairs (8.1%), this category would easily fall into Taptu's top 3”.