Yikes, it’s been a while since I wrote one of these things.

This one is about the Novint Falcon. I’ve been pretty excited waiting for this to launch and ship. As a reminder, the Falcon is a consumer-level haptic device with 3-degrees of freedom. It’s incredibly inexpensive (something like $250) for what it claims to offer and the hope is that this is the breakthrough that brings haptics to the masses.

I received mine a couple weeks ago and finally got around to trying it out this weekend. Installation was easy and it looks nice enough (though a lot larger than I imagined - didn’t think it would be as big as my head). Unfortunately, I regretfully must declare that I’m very disappointed in what it offers. The actual performance is acceptable, but not stunning. Pretty much in line with what I hoped for at this price point, but it didn’t exceed my expectations.

The real disappointment was in the bundled applications that came with it. The tutorial presented the basic “feel spheres of different textures” and “feel the inertia of a ball on a rubber band” demos that have long made rounds within the haptics communities. The problem is that these are gimmicks. They don’t provide any utility in the consumer market space and do nothing to lift haptics out of its gimmicky niche.

The bundled games weren’t any better. The ones I tried used haptics in ways where force-feedback was not essential to the gameplay (again, making the effect gimmicky) and in most cases, didn’t seem to be helpful in making the game more compelling. Note - I have not tried out all of the games yet, so if anybody has a recommendation for one that will blow my mind, please speak up.

Please give me “Delete All” for my iPhone email.

Thank you.

I’m succumbing and adding to the iPhone mad coverage. I figure there’s no better day to write about it than on the release day.

There’s been a lot of discussion about how bad the touchscreen keyboard will be. Based on all the negative comments from the rabble, technologists, and financial analysts (all of whom have yet to even use the thing), you’d think the device was forcing users to type with a one-button mouse or something like that. But based on pre-release reviews, the touchscreen keyboard seems to provide a decent level of usability. Of course, the reviewers given pre-release iPhones probably have a history of being friendly to Apple products, but none of them had really bad things to say about the typing experience.

Until there are some pretty fancy haptics involved, we’re not going to be able to replicate the tactile benefits of a physical keyboard over the software keyboard. But here are some benefts that a software-based keyboard can do that physical buttons can’t. These screen caps are from Apple’s iPhone keyboard video.

1. Visual buttons can change in appearance.

In this image, you see that a key press causes the button to get bigger, providing visual feedback instead of tactile feedback. For users who look at the keyboard when typing, this is very useful because the eyes don’t need to move in order to see what has been pressed. I haven’t learned to touch type on my Treo yet, so my eyes are constantly shifting between the keyboard and the typing field. For users who don’t touch type, I suspect the soft keyboard will be just as good, if not better than a physical one. For users who do type without looking at the keyboard, I suspect muscle memory will set in and they will also be able to touch type with a soft keyboard.

2. A software keyboard can change layouts for different use cases.

In one image, you see the keyboard while using email. In the other, the keyboard has changed to better address the needs when entering an URL. Not only can keys change their input content (”return” changes to “Go”), keys can also change in size and number (the single “space” key becomes three keys for “.”, “/”, and “.com”). There are some software/hardware hybrid keyboards that can change key mappings and even the visual display on the key cap, but they certainly can’t change the sizes or number of keys. These images show a fairly subtle instance of modifying the keyboard to usage, but it’s easy to imagine more drastic examples of contextual keyboard adaptation.

3. A software key can change its target size.

The actuation area of a software key is not limited to its visual presentation. This image shows that the touchable area for the “E” key actually overflows into the visual areas of the “W” and “R” keys. In this case, the context of the word allows the software to predict that the next letter is more likely to be an “E” than “W” or “R”, so it changes the input area to reflect this likelihood. The obvious concern is what happens if the user actually wants to type “W” or “R” in this case. How difficult will that be? Another concern is that there is an inconsistency between what you see and the underlying behavior. I wonder if they tried versions where the key expands visually to reflect its increased input area. Is it too distracting or confusing? I’m curious to find out.

4. Not really part of the keyboard, but related to text editing. This dynamic magnifying lens has appeared in desktop software and can be very useful in some cases. This is an interesting way to improve legibility of text on a small screen.

Aside from the device itself, I’m also finding myself fascinated with the blog coverage of the people waiting outside Apple stores. There’s something about how obsessed the bloggers are with how obsessed the iPhone early adopters are that is pretty entertaining. And apparently, The Woz is first in line at the Valley Fair Apple Store. And Bill Atkinson is in the Palo Alto line.

This may be THE most important location-based service that will ever exist. It’s a brilliant insight that applies the power of mobile technologies to addressing one of the most basic, primal user needs.

There’s been a lot of coverage recently following the announcement of the iPhone’s June 29 release date, so I won’t go into this too deeply other than to say that it still looks very cool. I’m also impressed with Apple’s 4 commercials for the iPhone. As somebody pointed out elsewhere, these 4 spots effectively teach users how to use the iPhone in a total of 90 seconds.

So rather than talk more about Apple’s contribution, here are 2 other interesting products along the same lines. The HTC phone is also a smartphone with a predominantly touchscreen-based UI. The UI isn’t nearly as slick as the iPhone’s, but at least there’s some competition now. It’s a Windows Mobile device that makes heavy use of gesture-based interaction. It will be interesting to compare this UI with the iPhone UI after they’re both available.

Another interesting product is Haptitouch. It’s from a company called F-Origin that I’ve never heard of. It looks like they’re very new and based in Finland. Their product suite provides haptic feedback in mobile device touchscreens and as well as some additional navigational aids. One is a tilting navigation that they call Iris. This allows lets you navigate documents and onscreen pages by tilting the device. My first question is how do they handle users tilting the device to achieve better viewing angles without performing a navigation action. I haven’t used their product yet, so I don’t know if there is a mechanism for this use case or not.

I guess the lesson is that all new technologies require a learning curve. I thought this was a humorous historical reenactment of how interaction cues that seem obvious to those on the design and development side may not be so obvious to end users who are new to a technology.

I went to CTIA last week in Orlando. It was a great time for many reasons, but the highlight by far was the keynote on Thursday morning by former presidents Bush Sr. and Clinton. The lasting impression is how incredibly convincing Clinton’s passion can be when he speaks. Yes, I’ve heard him on television many times in the past, but the effect of hearing him live in front of 12,000 people was electrifying. The communal and “big loudspeaker” environment made it a rather special experience. But on to the technology.

1. For the most part the panels were interesting but not stunning. After a while, you start hearing the same things over and over. At 3GSM, the mantra was getting content onto handsets. At CTIA, it was all about platform convergence - how to make the TV, PC, and mobile play well together.

I thought this was an interesting difference between the 2 shows: 3GSM in Europe and CTIA in the U.S. As everyone knows, mobile usage in Europe and Asia is more advanced than it is here in the U.S. Europeans use their phones for a wider variety of tasks, use them more frequently, and it’s a much more prominent part of their daily culture than it is here. On the flip side, the U.S. has a much stronger relationship with TV and PCs on a daily basis than Europeans do. So it seems very natural that one population pushes to make mobile the primary content platform while the other is trying to make 3 different platforms work together.

2. One of the neatest things I saw was software-based motion detection from GestureTek. It uses the camera on the handset to determine how it’s moving and then translates that motion into gestures. Very cool. The demo worked pretty well, too. I was surprised at how responsive it was. GestureTek seems to be focused on this product as a gaming tool, so hopefully they can piggyback on the Wii’s success for gesture-based games.

3. Saw the Qode booth from NeoMedia. This is a 2-D barcode system where users can “scan” the barcode with the cameras on the phones and receive whatever information is linked to the code. This is basically what my startup Gridtag was trying to do, but we had a much cooler coding system. Anyway, it’s nice to see this type of product, which is very popular in Japan, start appearing in the U.S. Or least have a booth at CTIA.

4. I played around with the new Upstage phone from Samsung available with Sprint. One side of the handset is a phone, with typical phone buttons. Flip it over and on the other side, it’s a music player with typical music player controls. It’s a neat idea and very impressive that that crammed all of that into something so small. It’s got pretty poor battery life, so it comes with a battery wallet that extends the life and actually isn’t very bulky at all. It was a bit annoying to have tiny screen on the phone side, but not as bad as I would have thought. After all, this takes us back 10 years as far as screen size is concerned. But it turns out that the larger screens aren’t so useful for phone functions. It’s there for content. And that’s what the flip side is for.

3GSM this year was big. This year, there were an estimated 55,000 visitors and 1,300 exhibitors. That’s a lot of booths to look at and a lot of swag to collect. Naturally, most of the freebies were pens. But at least some of them were very nice pens.

As for the products on display, there were a few highlights and a lot of “do what everyone else is doing” filler. There was a concerted focus on content to mobile and we saw a lot of content providers of video, music, and games. Some other observations and cool things I saw:

1. Phones as fashion
There is a continuing trend toward mobile phones as high fashion. We all know about the iPhone and how pretty it is. (Interestingly, although there was no Apple presence at 3GSM, I could still feel the impact of the iPhone in what other companies were saying and how the iPhone raised the bar for what a mobile device should be). At 3GSM, LG had their Prada phone on display and it looks great. Apparently, fashionable phone focus interaction through a touch screen, because like the iPhone, the Prada phone did this too. Seriously, though, the multi-touch screen really intrigues me and I think there will be some great interaction advances with this technology.

2. Great customer experience
I was fortunate to be able to hear a keynote session entitled “How mobile can be the next great information and entertainment channel.” The speakers were Edgar Bronfman Jr. - Chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group, Lucy Hood - CEO of Jamba, and Mika Salmi - President of MTV Networks Global Digital Media. Naturally, they all stressed the massive market potential for distributing content through mobile. But that’s easy to see. What really struck me was how emphatically they all stressed the importance of providing a great customer experience. They’re right, this is a tremendous challenge, given the technology and form factors that they’re dealing with. Both the delivery mechanisms and the receiving devices provide significant hurdles to a good user experience.

Eventually, it will happen, but my impression on hearing the talks was that in their minds, customer experience meant letting users have the content that they want when they want it. There wasn’t much attention given to how people should be experiencing all of this content on the device itself. How do you discover things? How to you manage your content? How do you facilitate social behavior and sharing? Let’s not forget that distributing the right content is critical, but it’s just as important to be able to do things easily with it after you have it.

3. Input technologies
I’m particularly interested in users’ physical relationships with their devices, so the area of input technologies is of great interest to me. There were some nice developments on display at 3GSM.

This thing drives me crazy. It’s a point of sale credit/debit machine and I’ve pressed the wrong button at least 3 times now. At some point during the payment process, the display says some stuff and asks me to “Press Enter or Cancel”. The device has permanent arrows painted below the display and 3 buttons below the arrows. The outer two buttons are aligned perfectly with the arrows. Furthermore, the words “Enter” and “Cancel” in the display are also aligned perfectly with the arrows. So at least three times now, I’ve pressed the button under the left arrow. This immediately voids the transaction and we need to start over from the beginning.

Apparently, what I’m supposed to do is press the “Enter” button at the bottom right corner of the terminal. The one that’s as far from the displayed message as can be and also on the opposite side from the displayed word “Enter”.

This is really cool. You draw things and it gives you physical models of what your drew. As this evolves to include more modeling complexity, it’s easy to see how this could be very useful for design prototyping as well as being a terrific educational tool. On a similar note, something that would be great for UI work is a tool that lets us draw UIs as workable prototypes. Draw a button, it behaves like a button. Draw list, it behaves like a list. If anybody is working on this, let me know!