Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

ARCChart has joined the bandwagon predicting that touchscreens are about to become the next big thing in mobile input technology. Yesterday they published an article titled "Keypad makes way for control surfaces," where they forecast that the mechanical buttons that festoon our phones these days are about to beat a hasty retreat in favor of soft interfaces where all the controls of the device display on a touch-sensitive screen. Stuff like this:


Slick!

Literally, slick. You can see the attraction with your eyes, but what about tactile feedback?

Of course, phones that use a touchscreen as the primary input are nothing new, though they seem for now to be aimed mainly at the power-geeks who want an über-smartphone that's more PDA than phone. I used a PDA-phone like this from 2000-2003 and was pleased with the experience. But (believe it or not) it was the first mobile phone I ever owned, so everything about it seemed new and cool. And it wasn't a phone that was popular with more than a handful of other geeks. If you are a regular you may have guessed the model. It was the Handspring VisorPhone!


I still love touchscreen devices, but as I spend more time using lots of modern smartphones I wonder if my conflicting desire for a tactile response from my personal devices isn't more indicative of the general user population. If anything, I find myself grumbling that my phones don't have enough buttons to activate common features that I want within easy click-range. Think how many times you've read the expression "satisfying click" in a review of a personal device and you start to realize how fundamental this aspect is in an input device.

The study of the touch-response from tools and devices is called haptics and it's an area of research that phone designers will need to explore to make these cool interfaces satisfy the sense of touch. I suspect we're a long way from having machine interfaces that can dynamically simulate the contours of various button displays from a flat surface. But simulating the clicking sensation, or at least a slight thump, when depressing a virtual button on a touchscreen would be a relatively simple mechanical problem. A tiny actuator that swung a pendulum-like cam against a hard stop would probably produce the sound and sensation of a clicking button fairly well. It's a simple enough thing to try that a hobbyist could experiment with it. What about it Matt Hamrick? And Ron, if you can get me one of these from Taiwan, I may disassemble the buttonless blob of a phone and experiment with it myself.