Hot on the heels of some of the Haptic Messaging ideas I touched on a few weeks ago come a concept design for an All-In-One Haptic Phone at Yanko Design.
The Haptic Phone marries the tactility and physicality of a real keyboard with the infinite flexibility of a touchscreen interface. Both front and back surfaces of the handset are touchscreens where the surface area can raise itself to mimic any combination of buttons and keyboard layouts.
Implementing such a surface requires some quantum leaps in materials technology, yet perhaps an intermediary step worth exploring is to take a touchscreen surface and overlay a grid of fixed, raised, tactile ’soft keys’ that change function depending on the content of the touchscreen beneath them.
More broadly, such concepts point to a palpable lack of innovation in mobile design – with the exception of the iPhone. We’re demanding more from our handsets (GPS, imaging, web browsing…) and yet UI thinking still seems to be constrained to keypads and menus.
The computing power of today’s high-end handsets exceeds the Windows desktops of the mid-90s, yet we’re content to see Nokia expend R&D effort on a 3D version of Snakes rather than UIs that make handsets easier to use and easier to navigate.
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