Few revolutions have transformed technology as much as the capacitive touch screen, but when one company famous for its use of buttons tried to do the same, the result was a disaster so comprehensive the company no longer exists.
Versatile interactive displays we activate with our fingers are now so ubiquitous that touch screen fingertips are available to ensure these interactions are hygienic and accurate. However, it was not always seen as a certainty that touch screens would be the standard for nearly every electronic device we use.
Even in 2007, when Apple launched their first iPhone and changed the shape of the mobile phone market forever, a lot of other manufacturers were not entirely sure how to respond, and no company was more wrong-footed than Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry.
The BlackBerry was not the first smartphone, but it was the first smartphone to become popular in the business world. They were wider than most phones and contained a full keyboard, allowing people to quickly send emails and instant messages whilst on the move.
Other companies quickly caught on, adding buttons to the bottom of their phones as well, or having a keyboard that slots out of the side. So when Steve Jobs directly criticised this approach in one of his most famous oratory moments, RIM knew they needed to react.
Their response was the BlackBerry Storm in 2008, a smartphone with no keyboard that theoretically replicated the feel of using one through a system known as SurePress, where the screen would be pressed in to feel like a button.
The problems were immediate and devastating. It was slower than either an Android or iOS virtual keyboard and far slower than the SureType keypad that BlackBerry users were used to.
It also had a habit of breaking constantly which meant almost all of the million handsets sold had to be replaced, and by the time the better but still flawed Storm 2 was released, the BlackBerry had been left far behind.
They never truly recovered from this, and the BlackBerry name now only appears on a limited number of Android phones made by a range of different companies.
