Could Touch Interfaces Lead to New Business?

The Unwired View had an “interesting” angle on LG Electronics’ touch interface patent waayyyy back:

To make the phone more fun to use, it can have a set of predefined actions associated with concrete events, like reception of new message, calendar alarm or low battery indication. E.g. when you receive new SMS, the fish shaped icon can sail to and swallow an envelope, spawning a number of siblings representing different menu options.

This can actually become a new revenue stream for creative types and mobile operators, with us buying personalized interfaces complete with sounds and animation, instead of ringtones and wallpapers.

To be honest though, a year later, we’re still not sold on the whole touch-feely interface thing. And before anything can become a business, it needs to appeal to customers. We have at least one person who feels like we do, albeit potty-mouthed as hell:

This keyboard will not only stomp your colon, but the colons of distant relatives of the human species such as lagomorphs, and hypothetical colons of children you haven’t even had yet. Want to type a backslash? No problem. Ampersand? You bet your ***. On an iPhone, you have to press an additional button that opens up an alternate keypad that will allow you to type numbers and punctuation. So typing something as simple as elipses (…) requires you to tap your finger 9 times. Enjoy your phone, losers! People like me who have **** to do will stick to a keyboard that doesn’t have its lips wrapped firmly to the user-interface equivalent of a throbbing ****:

We love physical buttons more than anything else. As we’ve written before, the LG Secret’s touch interface is more gimmicky than useful, and the iPhone’s virtual keyboard never really matched the pleasure we feel using thumb boards and keypads. This proposed LG interface may have all that visual eye candy and bells and whistles, but our first impression is that it will really do nothing for responsiveness, which we feel is still the most important aspect of any gadget’s UI.

Unless something really revolutionary comes along, you can pry our keyboards when you take them from our cold, dead hands.