Tapping into a new keyboard paradigm
Firm ups focus on virtual interface
WATERLOO, Ont. • For millions of BlackBerry fans, the enduring appeal of Research In Motion Ltd.’s smartphones can be summed up in six letters: QWERTY.
Those six letters adorn the buttons located at the top left hand side of each of the physical keyboards which have been a staple of RIM’s devices since the first BlackBerrys went on sale in 1999.
Indeed, it was the shape of the physical buttons on RIM’s early devices and their similarity to seeds, which helped inspire the very name, BlackBerry.
Although RIM has developed several BlackBerry devices in the past few years that do away with QWERTY keyboards in favour of touch screens for many people, the defining characteristic of a BlackBerry remains its keyboard.
On Wednesday, Canada’s embattled technology giant will take the wraps off its new operating system, BlackBerry 10, and the first two BlackBerry smartphones to be powered by the new software. One of those devices will feature a physical QWERTY keyboard, while the other is a full touch-screen device.
RIM has spent more than a year gearing up for the launch of BlackBerry 10 as it looks to attempt a comeback in the global smartphone industry, where the company has fallen behind Apple Inc.’s iPhone and devices running Google Inc.’s Android software.
In creating BlackBerry 10, RIM officials decided that the next generation of touch screen BlackBerrys required a new typing experience.
“We are known for the best physical keyboard, we want to be known for the best keyboard, period. Physical or touch,” RIM’s chief marketing officer Frank Boulben said in an interview.
The challenge for RIM was to take more than a decade of research, development and prototyping on physical keyboards and apply that knowledge to the creation of a virtual keyboard that would be displayed on a flat, glass screen.
According to Vivek Bhardwaj, RIM’s head of software portfolio for BlackBerry, the first step was to merge the hardware design and development teams with the software user interface teams.
“It was really the first time that we looked at what we had been doing for the last decade on our physical keyboards and started diving in really deep on all the research, all the development,” Bhardwaj said in an interview.
RIM has included a number of new features with its virtual keyboard in BlackBerry 10. To help facilitate one handed typing, a predictive text function aims to guess the next word a user means to type, then allowing the user to place that word in a sentence with the flick of a finger.
The virtual keyboard on RIM’s touch screen BlackBerry 10 device — which is set to ship to consumers before the QWERTY device is available — was designed with the physical keyboards of past BlackBerrys, like the Bold 9900, in mind.
For example, the keys on the BlackBerry 10 virtual keyboard run edge-to-edge with virtual frets separating the rows.
With its physical keyboards, RIM engineers spend hours testing prototypes; measuring how users strike keys with their thumbs, the angle of the thumb’s descent, and the pressure with which a key is pressed.
With the virtual keyboard, RIM’s engineers attempted to mimic some of those tests by creating a set of keypress modelling algorithms that would measure exactly where a user touches a screen when striking a key.
“The idea is that when the user has pressed enough keys, a picture emerges, almost like a virtual heat map, where it shows where the user is touching every single key,” Bhardwaj said.