Before I got my first “modern” smartphone, I was enjoying being a Blackberry user. It gave me unlimited web access and messaging, and of course, that lovely physical keyboard you could write a novel on using your thumbs.
However, while I miss losing physical keyboards on phones, the biggest feature I think we lost has to be the pointing device that Blackberry (and occasionally some other brands) used—a trackball or trackpad.
BlackBerry solved precision before touchscreens were popular on phones
Like most people, my Blackberry was my email and work machine in my pocket. Which meant having to do a lot of text selection. Since my Blackberry didn’t have a touch screen, it used a mouse pointer driven by either a trackball or trackpad. These pointing devices were precise. Just as precise as a desktop mouse. So my handling of things like browser windows, menus, scrolling and the like were a breeze, combined with a modifier key on the physical keyboard.
Basically, my Blackberry felt like a miniature PC with a keyboard and mouse. I don’t recall ever having true friction. To be honest, the only true benefit I got from switching to a full touch smartphone was a bigger screen.
Why touchscreens still struggle with the same job
You might not have noticed, depending on how you use your phone, but touch screens aren’t actually all that accurate. When you, for example, tap on a specific spot on the screen, it’s not an exact pixel-perfect reading of the touch point, but also the result of an algorithm estimating where you meant to touch.
To do something as simple as selecting and moving text, you have to tap a word, wait, choose how to select it, then adjust that selection, and then go through the whole thing again to select a new spot to move that text. Doing this now and then isn’t a big deal, but forget about editing a document. Even with all that screen real estate, I’m still hooking up a mouse and keyboard to my iPad or switching to a laptop.
To be fair, UX designers have been tweaking the software for touch interfaces constantly to make things better. For example, you can use the spacebar in the iOS keyboard as a precise trackpad if you press and hold it. If it wasn’t for that, I couldn’t stand text selection. But it still doesn’t beat the tactile feedback of a trackball!
BlackBerry understood something the industry forgot
All these years later, I still feel that Blackberry’s approach to controlling a smartphone was more useful, practical and sensible. Moving to a full touch screen on a phone gives you a more versatile control system, but one that ends up not being particularly good at any one thing. On top of that, if we still had Blackberry-style phones with keyboards and touchpads, and no touchscreens, our phones wouldn’t be as fragile in my opinion.
Honestly, most of the time we don’t even need as much screen real estate as we have, and when we’re using the on-screen keyboard, the same chunk of display is covered. I wish we still had business phones that gave us these physical controls. A rugged work machine that gives up some of that original iPhone bling and futurism to be better for work.
Why this feature still hasn’t truly been replaced
I mentioned that you can get some trackpad functionality from some touch keyboards, and that there are some gestures that help do things like text selection. However, these solutions all have tiny bits of friction compared to a physical pointing device and they add up the more you have to do the same repetitive task.
These days all the buzz is about the ascendance of folding phones, and honestly my opinion is that if you’re going to make folding and tri-folding devices, you might as well also offer hybrid devices with a slide-out keyboard and touchpad.
This gives you the best of both worlds with a big touch screen and the physical controls you need when you want to do more than simple baseline tasks on your phone. Part of this is a bit of a “me” problem because even after all these years, I still can’t type both quickly and accurately on a touchscreen keyboard. It’s one or the other, but not both.
I’ve tried swiping keyboards and other gimmicks, but in the end they all feel like tapping out Morse code on a telegram machine—but without the physical feedback.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want touch screens to go away. I love my big iPad, for example, where the much larger display largely removes the main pain point with touch input for me. But, not a day goes by I don’t curse trying to accurately interact with things on my tiny iPhone screen, and honestly, if a modern Blackberry-style clone came to market, I’d probably buy it in a heartbeat.
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