The occasional scrivener

Haptic and gestural interfaces on mobiles

Tom links to a post by Clive about the gestural interfaces on a new Samsung phone. Clive thinks the proposed inplmementation is pretty stupid, and I can’t really disagree.

Gestural interfaces have been around meme-wise for a long time (in fact, I wrote my thesis based on a proposed interface). You would think that they’d show up more now that mobiles are getting smaller and smaller. But the Samsung is the first mainstream model I’ve seen so far.

In fact, only one haptic interface has made serious inroads: the ubiquitous vibrate function on nearly every modern phone.

We haven’t really reached the point where the smallness of phones requires a radically new interface to exploit all the features within them.

But as Tom notes, existing interfaces can benefit from fresh thinking:

I mean, why do devices with stylus uniformly have interfaces which require you to stab small areas of a small screen with a small pointer? Why not have them use long, sweeping strokes of a stylus, mimicking the way we write with pen and paper?

Posted at 19:29, in the comm » mobile category. Comments [0]
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