The BlackBerry Storm showed why you should never turn a touchscreen into a button
by Chaim Gartenberg from The Verge - All Posts on (#5XPTR)
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge 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, What if a touchscreen was also a hardware button?"
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 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...