The BlackBerry Storm confirmed why you must by no means flip a touchscreen right into a button

In 2007, the iPhone ushered in an period of touchscreen devices that brought on most buttons to fade from our telephones without end. But there was one transient second within the grey, transitory haze between buttons and touchscreens that an unlikely firm tried to fuse the 2 collectively. BlackBerry break up the distinction by boldly asking, “What if a touchscreen was also a hardware button?”

Thus was born the BlackBerry Storm, a tool whose total touchscreen doubled as a pressable button. The Storm was one of many first (and final) makes an attempt to bridge the legacy world of bodily keyboards and the fashionable world of touchscreens. But to grasp the existence of the BlackBerry Storm and its weird clicking display screen, we first want to return and perceive BlackBerry on the peak of its energy — and why it needed to maintain buttons alive.

To BlackBerry, buttons had been the complete level of its merchandise. When you image a BlackBerry cellphone in your head, you’re not seeing an interchangeable slab. You’re seeing a full QWERTY keyboard that spans the decrease third of a cellphone, with impossibly small keys which might be by some means good to kind on. A BlackBerry with out the ever-present, clicky keyboard for firing off BBM messages and emails was hardly a BlackBerry in any respect. Even the corporate’s emblem evokes the chiclet keys that constructed its model.

But even essentially the most beloved buttons can’t beat again the inexorable waves of progress: touchscreens had been the longer term, and BlackBerry needed to bounce on board. As Steve Jobs commented in his now-famous 2007 iPhone introduction, telephones just like the BlackBerry or Palm Treo “all 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.” And as such, they’re unable to adapt to particular purposes or consumer interfaces. It was an remark that will precede the announcement of the touchscreen-only iPhone and the start of the tip for {hardware} buttons on telephones.

BlackBerry received the message. And so, in 2008, the corporate made the Storm, its first touchscreen cellphone. At the time, the machine had a 3.25-inch display screen, a lot bigger than its then-typical 2.5-inch screens. And it didn’t have a bodily keyboard.

Instead, the Storm had a singular “SurePress” show: fairly than keyboard buttons, the total show was a huge button that could possibly be clicked down like a trackpad. On an iPhone, you merely tapped away at a digital keyboard with no actual indication that you just had been urgent something. On the BlackBerry Storm, you bodily needed to “press” every key to kind, full with an ultra-satisfying “click” sound, because of the mechanical swap beneath.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

It was an incredible thought, in concept. In observe, the Storm was horrible to kind on. (There’s a cause we use a lot of little keys to kind fairly than one large button.) The large display screen on the Storm was sluggish and needed to totally decrease and lift earlier than you possibly can press one other key. The lightning-fast typing that BlackBerry energy customers had grown used to slowed to a glacial tempo — typing out one letter at a time.

The firm would attempt to tweak the method on the Storm2 a yr later, changing the only mechanical swap with four piezoelectric switches on the corners of the show (making it potential to “press” a number of keys without delay). It additionally added a full-size QWERTY keyboard in vertical orientation (the place the unique solely supplied an odd two-letter-per-key possibility). But even then, the SurePress expertise wasn’t adequate to duplicate the sensation of typing on certainly one of BlackBerry’s regular keyboards.

BlackBerry tried to supply prospects the perfect of each worlds when it made the Storm; as a substitute, it managed to harness the worst qualities of each bodily {hardware} and touchscreen typing. It resulted in a laggy, sluggish expertise that wasn’t notably pleasurable or straightforward to kind on. The bodily parts had been louder and extra fatiguing for customers than a conventional QWERTY keyboard, with none of the tactile advantages of a number of {hardware} keys. The added friction from the bodily swap detracted from any main advantages of a touchscreen for typing, too.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

It’s no marvel that BlackBerry would abandon its SurePress expertise shortly afterward: in 2010, its subsequent flagship, the BlackBerry Torch, would supply a show that was the identical dimension because the Storm however with a conventional BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard.

BlackBerry would bounce between full touchscreen gadgets and its acquainted {hardware} keyboard for years after the Storm (even providing each in lots of circumstances). But the corporate by no means tried to construct a tactile touchscreen once more.

Because whereas buttons could be a great way to make use of a cellphone — and touchscreens could be a great way to make use of a cellphone — an enormous touchscreen-button hybrid turned out to be a horrible thought.