{"id":2658,"date":"2022-03-31T14:46:10","date_gmt":"2022-03-31T14:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/03\/31\/the-blackberry-storm-showed-why-you-should-never-turn-a-touchscreen-into-a-button\/"},"modified":"2022-03-31T14:46:13","modified_gmt":"2022-03-31T14:46:13","slug":"the-blackberry-storm-showed-why-you-should-never-turn-a-touchscreen-into-a-button","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/03\/31\/the-blackberry-storm-showed-why-you-should-never-turn-a-touchscreen-into-a-button\/","title":{"rendered":"The BlackBerry Storm showed why you should never turn a touchscreen into a button"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/23002238\/blackberry-storm-surepress-screen-button-touchscreen-technology<\/a>
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In 2007, the iPhone ushered in an era of touchscreen gadgets that caused most buttons to vanish from our phones forever. But there was one brief moment in the gray, transitory haze between buttons and touchscreens that an unlikely company tried to fuse the two together. BlackBerry split the difference by boldly asking, \u201cWhat if a touchscreen was also<\/em> a hardware button?\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus was born the BlackBerry Storm, a device whose entire touchscreen doubled as a pressable button. The Storm was one of the first (and last) attempts to bridge the legacy world<\/a> of physical keyboards and the modern world of touchscreens. But to understand the existence of the BlackBerry Storm and its bizarre clicking screen, we first need to go back and understand BlackBerry at the height of its power \u2014 and why it wanted to keep buttons alive. <\/p>\n

To BlackBerry, buttons were<\/em> the entire point of its products. When you picture a BlackBerry phone in your head, you\u2019re not seeing an interchangeable slab. You\u2019re seeing a full QWERTY keyboard that spans the lower third of a phone, with impossibly small keys that are somehow perfect to type on. A BlackBerry without the ubiquitous, clicky keyboard for firing off BBM messages and emails was hardly a BlackBerry at all. Even the company\u2019s logo evokes the chiclet keys that built its brand.<\/p>\n

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales \/ The Verge<\/cite><\/p>\n

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But even the most beloved buttons can\u2019t beat back the inexorable waves of progress: touchscreens were the future, and BlackBerry had to jump on board. As Steve Jobs commented in his now-famous 2007 iPhone introduction<\/a>, phones like the BlackBerry or Palm Treo \u201call have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not to be there, and they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic.\u201d And as such, they\u2019re unable to adapt to specific applications or user interfaces. It was an observation that would precede the announcement of the touchscreen-only iPhone and the beginning of the end for hardware buttons on phones. <\/p>\n

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