Blackberry Storm's Surprise Screen : Blackberry Storm: Touch Without Haptics

1.Blackberry Storm: Touch Without Haptics

The Blackberry Storm is RIM’s first touch screen device, and it is designed to appeal to a consumer market that’s crazy about the iPhone. It has the largest screen of any Blackberry to date, and to make room for that 3.25” touch screen, RIM has left out what most people think is the definitive feature of every other Blackberry: the keyboard. And they convert DVD to blackberry to enjoy anywhere.

Instead, the on-screen keyboard uses what RIM calls "tactile-touch" feedback that it claims offers "easy and precise touch screen typing." In fact, its a spring-loaded touchscreen that acts like a big button — a departure from the haptics-based touchscreen technology currently available to consumers.

Throughout the summer and into early fall, gadget blogs were abuzz about the new Blackberry that eschewed a keyboard but incorporated a touch screen that could best Apple’s through tactile feedback. Tipsters and analysts mulled over the scarce data available about the new phone and deduced that it would use “haptic” technology: a series of little motorized bumps that let you know you just hit a key. After all, the Blackberry already had vibrating tech built-in, as does nearly every phone on the market that can be set to buzz instead of ring. Apple’s phone slows you down because you don’t feel the feedback in your hand, but this Blackberry would give you signals.

This seemed plausible to everyone — including Tom’s Guide — because several handset manufacturers have already turned to haptic feedback to make touch keyboards more usable. Many of them use San Jose-based Immersion Corp.’s VibeTonz technology to get finer control of the vibration than just turning it on or off.

But everyone was wrong. After RIM officially launched the Blackberry Storm on October 8, the company began divulging more details about its new phone and correcting assumptions about the touch screen that everyone had been making for months (for more details on the pre-launch rumors, see page 6).

RIM didn’t incorporate the common vibrotactile haptic feedback into its Storm — instead, the company revealed on October 9 that the whole screen clicks like a big button.Why is RIM taking this different approach? Why did so many people assume RIM would use vibrotactile haptics? And why do you need mechanical feedback on a digital touch screen anyway?

2. RIM Does Without the Keyboard
For RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie, it’s not actually the physical keyboard that’s the essence of the Blackberry — it’s whatever makes users more efficient and lets them get more done, he said. “The thing is, if you don’t design something for its intended purpose, it becomes cumbersome. When it comes to input and output and form factor, whether it’s a media player or speakers or a camera, or a keyboard versus a SureType or other derivatives — we’re not religious," Balsillie said. "We’re not religious on input. We’re not religious on form factor. We’re religious on efficiency." And efficiency for typical Blackberry users includes being able to type full words and sentences, with punctuation, quickly and accurately.

A virtual keyboard doesn’t take up any space when you’re not using it, and it’s flexible; you can switch from QWERTY to a foreign language to music and browser controls instantly. But unlike a physical keyboard, you can’t tell without looking whether your finger is on one key or two and you don’t get the feel of the key moving when you press it, so you’re more likely to press twice or not press hard enough.

Studies conducted during the 1990s comparing typing speed and accuracy on touch screen and physical keyboards show it’s slower to move from one key to the next on a touch screen and you spend more time pressing each key. Although adding audio feedback (like the clicks on the iPhone keyboard) speeds up moving between and hitting keys, it can’t bring you back to the speed you can get on a physical keyboard.

And you’re always more accurate on a physical keyboard than you are on a touch screen. If you’re not a touch typist, you’ll get faster and more accurate after a few days of using a touch screen but you’d still get 10-15% more typing done in the same time on a physical keyboard. Expert typists don’t find the touch screen better over time and they get twice as much typing done on a physical keyboard where they get physical feedback. You can see the same difference in a recent study from the University of Glasgow comparing QWERTY and touch screen phones.
Many Blackberry users count themselves as expert typists. After RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis publicly criticized the difficulty of typing on glass, and Vodafone had asked for a touch screen phone that was something different, RIM would never have launched a touch screen without some kind of feedback to improve the experience.

3. Touch Screens Look Pretty, Make Mistakes
Just looking at the screen as you type doesn’t help as much as you’d expect, Michael Wehrs, vice president of evangelism at Nuance (the company that now owns the technology behind the T9 predictive text input system), said. “People mis-hit keys on a soft keyboard, especially on glass where you have the problem of parallax,” Wehrs said.

The glass screen acts as a lens refracting the image of the keyboard and the keys seem to be slightly displaced from their actual position. You can’t correct this easily with software because it depends on the angle you’re looking at the screen from, your eyesight and even the amount of light. In theory, using a mechanical effect like vibration to tell you when you hit a key should let you type more quickly and more accurately, because you can learn to compensate for it more easily.

This is known as haptic (from the Greek word for touch) or tactile feedback and it’s been a subject of research for decades. In 1960, Professor Frank Geldard of the University of Virginia observed that unusual patterns of vibration attract our attention easily and could be used for alerts. There are two main types of haptics: vibrotactile feedback, which you feel under the skin as a vibration, and kinesthetic, which involves actual movement of the body.

Phones already come with a mechanical motor to vibrate them — 95% of them have a spinning motor and a few have a linear actuation motor that moves up and down like a speaker. But you can convert video to blackberry.

Immersion’s VibeTonz technology can control either type of motor accurately enough to choose the speed and frequency of the vibration as well as how long it lasts, how strong it is and how it starts and stops. VibeTonz has eight different kinds of key clicks, for example, and the handset manufacturers can combine them. “With a full VibeTonz implementation, you can control it just like audio and we can do everything up to symphonies,” Mike Levin, vice president of Immersion, said.

Manufacturers are buying into Immersion’s tech. Nokia has just launched its first touch screen phone, the 5800 Xpress Music, which has haptic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic feedback for menus and the on-screen keyboard. Expect more touch screen devices from Nokia in 2009, “in particular an N-Series class of device,” Jonathan Arber, a research analyst for IDC, said.

Samsung, LG, Motorola and some media player http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Player manufacturers have been producing devices with touch feedback for more than a year, including the best-selling sprint Instinct and the LG View, Viewty and Voyager, as well as a string of devices available only in Asian markets.

Consumers have good reason to want this technology in their phones, too — it appears to increase efficiency. In studies, users can easily identify up to 85 different haptic rhythms or "tactons" (the tactile equivalent of icons). That’s useful for alerts, so you can tell who is calling, whom a new message is from or whether you’ve just been out-bid on eBay. But finer control can also improve typing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typing accuracy.
Researchers at Glasgow University compared a Treo 750 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_750 with a QWERTY keyboard to the standard virtual keyboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_keyboard on the Samsung i718 smartphone and to a touch keyboard that the researchers designed for the i718 using VibeTonz haptic feedback. They added different tactons so users could tell when they were touching a button, touching the home keys (F and J), clicking on a button or touching the edge of a button. Then they asked users to type in a poem, either while seated in a lab or standing on a moving subway train.

The touch screen keyboard was substantially better with haptic feedback than without it. The keyboard was also almost as good as a physical QWERTY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY keyboard, while adding a more expensive linear actuator improved typing performance even more. The users also found typing on screen was less annoying and frustrating with the haptic feedback.

The research team has developed an experimental haptic keyboard for the iPhone Though the iPhone does not incorporate haptics or tactile feedback of any kind today, you can never count Apple out of a hot area of consumer electronics. The company has applied for a patent on its own brand of touch screen feedback, so wait and see.