The ultimate form of mobile phone anti-false touch technology is a complete failure

As we all know, the large-size full touch screen has long become the most mainstream appearance and interaction design of smart phones. Especially for those top flagship models, they are not only larger in screen size, but also many use curved screens instead of straight screens.

To be fair, curved screens actually have many benefits, such as making the fuselage look more unique, making the grip feel better, and making the touch at the edge of the screen smoother. At the same time, for the industrial design of smart phones, the curved screen can achieve a larger internal volume under the premise of controlling the thickness of the frame in the fuselage, which is conducive to the "stacking" design in the configuration of images, batteries, speakers and so on.

Of course, in addition to these many benefits, the curved screen has also been "disliked" by some users. For example, some people are worried that the cover glass of the curved screen will be more resistant to falling than the straight screen, and the screen of the flagship model is often made of better materials, so it will bring higher potential maintenance costs.

For example, in the eyes of many mobile game players, the edge of the curved screen is also a big problem. Especially in some tower defense games, due to the frequent need to swipe up from the bottom of the screen (when holding horizontally), it is easy to cause false touch on the curved screen, so that the multi-task interface is called up, or even directly launched the application, the experience is indeed worse.

In the face of this situation, mobile phone manufacturers are certainly not indifferent. On the one hand, friends who pay attention to the mobile phone circle know that the current top flagships often use high-cost special glass covers, making some of these models much better than the straight-screen models in terms of drop resistance and wear resistance.

On the other hand, today's smartphones are also generally built-in with a variety of "anti-false touch" related technologies. For example, the sensitivity of the screen edge is automatically reduced when the game starts, such as identifying really effective touches and occasional mistouchings through AI algorithms.

However, what everyone may not know is that in fact, as early as ten years ago, there have been manufacturers in the mobile phone industry who have taken "anti-false touch" as the biggest selling point of their products, and made a touch screen design that may be the best anti-false touch effect so far. But the product itself did not achieve the expected success, not only that, it even became a joke in the industry to some extent, and was later regarded as the key to the prosperity and decline of related brands.

This is BlackBerry and their 2008 Launch Storm, a touchscreen model that makes "false touch prevention" the ultimate, but it is precisely because of this that it has suffered a major failure.

In 2007, Apple released the original iPhone. Although it is not the industry's first smartphone product to use a capacitive touch screen, the iPhone has successfully introduced the concept of capacitive touch screen operation to the world through the combination of software and hardware design.

Of course, just like today's full-touchscreen models, the original iPhone also had the trouble of mistouching. Perhaps it was precisely in this sight that when BlackBerry unveiled its first all-touchscreen flagship, storm in 2008, they equipped it with a touchscreen design called "SurePress" designed to be completely anti-false touch.

How does "SurePress" work? In simple terms, it is actually equipped with a mechanical "enter" key for the touch screen, and under the entire screen, there is a huge button structure with crisp mechanical feedback. In this way, when the user uses the BlackBerry Storm, it can first be swiped and selected by touch like other touchscreen models, and then it must be pressed the screen, accompanied by a crisp mechanical button to trigger the feel, in order to complete the confirm (or open) operation.

At first glance, this seems like a fairly reliable anti-false touch design. But in fact, because the "SurePress" touch screen logically completely makes a strict distinction between the "selected" touch and the "confirm" of the press, it has caused great trouble.

Imagine if we removed the left and right buttons of the mouse and then stipulated that the mouse must be used with the "Enter" key on the keyboard. That's right, that's exactly the strange way to go with the first users who bought BlackBerry Storm. To make matters worse, previous BlackBerrys have always been known for their extremely high word processing efficiency. But thanks to The SurePress touch screen design, when users use BlackBerry Storm's touch screen to type, each word must be pressed the screen, which naturally brings unprecedented and extremely low input efficiency.

Not only that, since the "SurePress" touch screen needs to install a mechanical button device under the entire screen, this also means that the entire screen is actually not hard connected to the rest of the fuselage, and when the user touches the screen, it will feel that the entire screen is shaking. Moreover, there is still a big gap between the side of the screen and the fuselage frame, so it is inevitable that the problem of dust accumulation and even water damage will inevitably be used for a long time.

Because of this, although the "SurePress" touch screen can theoretically achieve 100% anti-false touch effect, its poor hand feel, extremely low input efficiency, and very unsurpassed mechanical structure have eventually become tragedies. Especially after comparing with the original iPhone, although there was a mistake, but the touch experience was much smoother, consumers at that time had the impression of "BlackBerry in the East".

Finally, only a year later, BlackBerry canceled the "SurePress" touch screen design based on mechanical press switches on Storm2 and replaced it with a capacitive pressure sensor based on piezoelectric sensors, which still failed to gain the favor of consumers. So after that, this touch screen design that focused on "anti-false touch" was completely abandoned by BlackBerry, and it has not appeared in the mobile phone industry since then.

【The picture of this article comes from the network】