Blackberry Storm's Surprise Screen

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 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.