Blackberry Storm's Surprise Screen : Blackberry Storm: Touch Without Haptics - 2

5. The Storm’s Springy Tactile Feedback
By now, vibrating tactile feedback sounds pretty promising. However, Blackberry opted out of this technology with the Storm. Will customers suffer from RIM’s deliberate omission?
Unlike Windows Mobile devices, where touch screen and keypad-driven devices have radically different interfaces and features, the Storm is built on the same Blackberry 9000 platform (codenamed Thunder) as the Bold. The on-screen buttons don’t look precisely the same, but the OS, the browser and other features are the same, and the familiar Blackberry menu button remains present for applications that aren’t optimized for touch.

Open the keyboard when you hold the Storm in portrait mode like a normal Blackberry and you’ll get the Blackberry Pearl-style SureType keyboard, where many keys have two letters on them (or you can choose a traditional phone keypad where you tap multiple times to choose the letter you want).
Turn the Storm sideways and the accelerometer switches it into landscape mode, with the full QWERTY touch screen keyboard. The screen is spring-loaded. Press on a key and it lights up to make it easier to see whether you’ve hit the key you meant to (the iPhone does this as well through enlarging each key), but the whole screen clicks down or depresses like a key on a physical keyboard.

That’s not haptic feedback, a RIM spokesperson pointed out. “The Blackberry Storm doesn’t include haptics," the spokesperson said. "The entire screen functions like a big button and depresses when the user clicks it. Neither the case nor the screen vibrates, and there’s no vibrational motor."

Because the Storm’s screen is on springs, it also is clickable for links in the browser, plus there is an arrow cursor that follows your finger across the screen, confirming what you’re going to select if you do indeed press down. Just as a tablet PC with an active digitizer (most tablets have this) lets you see what you can click on the same way a mouse does on a PC screen (and so feels much more responsive than one with a passive pen that doesn’t give you hints about the interface), having a cursor that makes it very clear what you’re going to click on could improve the touch screen experience on the Storm as well.

Here’s a video from European carrier Vodafone extolling the virtues of the Storm’s touch screen.

The feedback isn’t localized either, a RIM spokesperson said. “When you press the right side of the screen, the whole screen depresses (and the same goes for the left side),” the spokesperson said. But that feedback will still be helpful for using the keyboard.
Although there are experimental technologies like piezoelectric actuators (used in Nokia’s Haptikos prototype, some Alpine car stereos and some portable devices available in Japan) that can give you feedback closer to the area you press on, most vibrotactile haptic feedback vibrates the whole device.

Piezoelectric actuators can be very small and thin and they use very little current, but they need a very high voltage (up to 300 V), which means you need a separate power circuit in the device. The vibration feels different too, Immersion’s Levin said. “They’re higher frequency so they can give very crisp effects," Levin said. "You get very small but quick motions out of them — you’re going to get a quick click but you won’t feel it moving the way a real key would.”
RIM is working with Immersion, Levin confirmed. "We’ve got a relationship with RIM, but it is nothing I can disclose,” Levin said. So why didn’t the Storm incorporate the vibrotactile feedback most people think of when they talk about haptics?

6. So, Why Doesn’t the Storm Use Haptics?
The cost of the actuators — or more likely the space needed to fit them in — may have been an issue; the Storm doesn’t have Wi-Fi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi and RIM says there simply wasn’t room on the motherboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motherboard for it. But it’s also likely that RIM chose the spring-loaded screen because of the impact it would have on battery life, which the company is fanatical about. "If battery life doesn’t last an extended day, people won’t use it," RIM’s Lazaridis said.

For the other new Blackberry launching this season, the Bold, RIM claims twice the battery life of other 3G phones, and it has put a lot of research and development into making that happen, including tuning the 3G radio stack so it disconnects after sending data rather than waiting for an acknowledgment. Feature phones from LG that use feedback don’t have significant battery life issues, but the Storm needs to power a faster processor and more memory to support the new browser, and Blackberry users tend to type significantly longer messages and send more emails than average phone users do. Even a small drain on the battery could be too much.

One reason that haptics would seem to be the obvious solution for tactile feedback on phones is the number of phones that already use it, Immersion’s Levin said. “What we’ve seen from Samsung and LG is that they’ve determined all touch screen phones need some level of haptic confirmation," Levin said. "It seems almost every new touch screen phone has VibeTonz in.” Between them, manufacturers have launched 93 different VibeTonz models worldwide since 2005.

April’s report in the New York Times about a touch screen Blackberry known internally as the "Apple Killer" didn’t mention feedback technology. But the Boy Genius Report blog gave details in July about a touch screen Blackberry that it called the Thunder, with “haptic feedback” as well as a screen that “clicks.

A reader using the name "bomba" who claimed to have seen the Thunder in action posted details on CrackBerry.com, saying “you actually push the screen in to make buttons do things.” While another reader asked if the phone used haptic feedback, bomba didn’t confirm this.
The CrackBerry blog followed up with a post talking about the screen pushing in "a little" and added that it gave “localized haptic” feedback: "You hear an audible clickety sound, and can feel a buzz in your finger where you actually pressed on the display," the post said.


Other CrackBerry posts repeated the haptic claims. By September, CrackBerry was showing a Verizon flyer for the Storm describing "a ’click’ touch screen for smooth precise text input that feels like a keyboard” with no mention of any vibrotactile feedback, but the idea that the Storm had vibrotactile haptics had stuck and many articles still repeat the rumor.

7. Beyond the Touch Keyboard

The Storm does have multi-touch support and gesturing capability. You’ll be able to select a block of text by putting one finger at the start and the other where you want the selection to stop. You can tap in the browser to zoom in and slide your finger to scroll or swipe it to pane. These aren’t the same multi-touch gestures as on the iPhone, but the Storm has other features the iPhone doesn’t: cut and paste and the ability to use it as a 3G modem with your laptop for dial-up networking on the go.

Gestures are going to become increasingly important on phones. On-screen multi-touch gestures are just the beginning. Bill Pinnell, user interface, graphics and mobile gaming principle product manager at phone operating system company Symbian, predicts the advent of “3D spatialized gestures that are less about looking at device and interacting with it and more about using the device in your hand and interacting with the environment.” He talks about combining touch and multi-touch with shaking, rotating or flipping the phone.

When Series 60 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S60_platform gets HDMI support so you can connect your phone to an HD display, he imagines using it to play a game, control the volume or paint. “How you hold the device would control the strokes of ink on the virtual canvas ," Pinnell said. "Think about moving photos around or grabbing things by pinching towards the screen — you’ll have items you can flick around, float around or push and prod.” And you’ll also want haptic feedback to know when you’ve selected an item or the phone has detected a gesture.


All of these functions are due in Symbian 9.5, possibly launching next year, which will have an extensible sensor framework that can integrate accelerometers, compasses and other sensors. There are more advanced vibrotactile haptics coming from Immersion and other companies. Phones with multiple actuators could give you directions with feedback dictating which way you should turn your phone for various effects. Isolating the screen and attaching actuators to it would give feedback through the screen itself. Put it all together with the processing power of the GPUs that Pinnell believes will be in nearly all high-end mobile phones in 2009 and 2010, and 3D gestures and haptics could combine to create an immersive user interface that’s far beyond a Virtual_keyboard .