News Audio-based touch for old handsets

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/09/10/audio-based-touch-for-old-handsets/1

 

Yuck. Took me ages to find an Android phone i liked with a keyboard, why is everyone so obsessed with touchscreens?

 

I'm with you man I purposely choose cheaper phones with a proper keypad or full qwerty to avoid touchscreens they are just overrated and are just frustrating even on high end hardware.

 

I am actually considering getting myself one of these:

http://www.retrobrick.com/7110.html

Call me old-fashioned, but I just want a phone that does text messages and phone calls and stores numbers. I've spent a lot of time building and configuring computers to do everything else I like to do and I'm perfectly capable of keeping myself sufficiently organised to avoid the need for web/email/maps/stocks/music/movies/gta/fart machine to be built into my phone.

 

I agree, touchscreens are not good. That is to say that they're not inherently good, which people seem to assume - bad touch screens are terrible!

That said, some touchscreens are fantastic (E.g. the uniquitous fruit phone*).

*Let's see how far the comments can go before someone mentions it by name.

 

I prefer touch screen phones with querty keypads. I can type much faster on a keypad than anything else, and the touch screen is better for things like browsing web pages. Although, I do miss having a physical numpad so I can press option numbers while on a call without pulling the phone away to look at it. Can't have it all though, you have to comprimise with small form factors afterall.

 

Yes i find that with a touch phone even just making a simple phone call take more presses than it use to on a phone with buttons.

 

don't go for that phone, had one of them, they brick up after a couple months of use =/
at least it was a company phone...

 

sure it has a nice screen, but said fruit phone is too overpriced...
1200€ over here (not many people like buying phones with contracts... specially if those contracts are only nice when you pay 100€/month, yeah portugal sucks with contract prices)

 

I love touch control. It's infinitely more adaptable and intuitive than hardware keys. (When done properly.*)

Going back to physical keys only would be like someone taking away my mouse and saying "keyboard only for you young man." Sure, I could survive, but it would be a chore.

*And not on a fruit. Because fruit is for monkeys.

 

Problem with qwerty keyboards on phones is that they don't use the same auto correct as touchscreens. Whether physical or on a screen, if I'm typing fast on something that small, I'm going to make mistakes, and having to go back and fix them all kills those small physical keyboards for me. Plus, physical keyboards are a waste of space on smart phones that have to have big screens anyway unless you can't get by without them. They take up a lot of space and are very complex in the design, I would rather have a faster processor, more memory, or a bigger battery in that space.

 

I can appreciate what people's preferences are...but for me the ability to do everything from one handset, game, email, surf the net, text and even do that archaic thing called making a phone call...well being able to do all that from one handset is fantastic. I spend less time running to my laptop/pc to do menial things like look for phone numbers of companies or check my mail or check directions. So much faster via touch screen. Centralised devices are the future IMO.

 

I might whine about my brick like N900, but when push comes to shove I'd take it over an iPhone 4 any day, for the N900 has an actual hardware keyboard. Swype etc might close the gap, but innately there's a untouchable superiority physical keyboards have for me, at least.

 

-1000000000 and comment ignored for losing the fruit game.

 

How on EARTH is one microphone (and a not very good quality one at that) going to resolve sounds coming three spatial dimensions so it can differentiate between taps to the screen, the sides and back of the handset? Simply holding the phone slightly differently in your hand will alter the acoustic characteristics of the body of the phone enough to make this idea useless. You would have to calibrate the phone "touch" screen every single time you used the handset.
Couple that with the wildly different acoustic properties of different rooms (you'd have to calibrate the touch screen again when you went to the bathroom), and you're already talking about a system that will be fraught with so many problems it's not even feasible on paper. And that's before you start worrying about how to filter out back ground noise, the sound of you simply holding the phone as it moves slightly in your hand, and of course the sound of you talking into the device.

 

In addition, sound in a solid travels considerably faster, closer to 500 m/s. A sound wave in a device will take only a 1/500,000th of a second to travel 1mm. The response time is therefore going to necessarily be close to the MHz scale. Considering that audio quality is measured in the KHz, I really doubt it is possible for the triangulation to detect a meter difference.

 

And none of the phone manufacturers will bother back-porting it anyway, they'd obviously prefer users to buy the latest and greatest. I personally don't mind standard keypads, the only problem is when scrolling through long lists (but I only find them in the music player, and then you can just open the track through the gallery anyway)

 

Exactly! Standard wave mechanics states you need a higher frequency wave to measure smaller objects and be able to resolve down to a smaller resolution. If this Cambridge firm did any research at all, they'd know that!

 

also triangulation using only one point of reference?
fail. Good concept though, just unworkable and in the end pointless on old handsets.

 

Yeah, if you wanna go retro get a 6310i - they work and they last. I've been back using one for a couple of years now. Best thing is the 7-day standby time - and that's with a 2nd hand battery. Strangely the thing I miss most about more modern handsets is being able to have my own mp3 ringtone - couldn't give a monkey's for all the other nonsense!