Competition is Good
Blackberry is set to release an iPhone competitor with a large touchscreen and a new innovation: the screen is actually a button that clicks when you press on it.
I doubt that its UI is a match for the iPhone, but that clicking screen seems like a genuinely useful innovation. One of the most unfortunate user-experience tradeoffs of the iPhone’s use of its touchscreen for nearly all aspects of its operation is that hitting those icons gives no meaningful, immediate feedback to the user, as a physical button would. Some buttons emit a glow when they are in their “pressed” state, but first, it’s easy for this kind of visual feedback to become obscured by your finger, and second, that still doesn’t tell you whether the iPhone has registered your “click.” If you press a button and nothing happens immediately, you can’t tell if your gesture didn’t correctly register as a button press, or if the iPhone is just taking a long time to bring you to the next step.
But besides that—and the difficult-to-use onscreen keyboard—the iPhone is pretty awesome.
