New BlackBerrys to Have Virtual Keyboards

By: Zain Nabi  |   January 28th, 2013   |   News, Smartphones

Apart from many other features, BlackBerrys are liked by users for their keyboards and the shape of physical buttons on them. As Research in Motion (RIM) gets ready for the launch of BlackBerry 10, the new smartphone that is expected to compete strongly in the market, the Canadian-based company has announced that the new version will have a virtual keyboard.

 

RIM will launch two different versions of BlackBerry 10 on January 30; one of them will have a physical keyboard while the other will have a virtual keyboard. The touchscreen feature will, however, be different from the ones we find in many other smartphones. RIM has carried out a massive research to present the same friendly experience to the users as it did with the physical keyboard.

 

According to Financial Post, Vivek Bhardwaj, RIM’s head of software portfolio for BlackBerry, said of presenting the same experience to the users in the touchscreen keyboards:

 

“If you think of all the prototypes that are built for a physical keyboard, and all the usability testing — hours and hours of usability testing — a lot of those data points that we had are actually quite useful for designing a touchscreen keyboard. We spent a lot of time gathering that information and really starting to move that across from the physical world to what we ended up doing in the software world.”

 

He added:

 

“If you look at other touchscreen keyboards, the keys are often like little bubbles, and our keys are all put together just like they would be on a physical keyboard.”

 

The engineers at RIM have made algorithms to determine where a user hit their finger when typing a world. If their thumb or finger is not touching any key correctly, the keys will readjust themselves as per the typing mode of any given user and hence they would be able to type faster within a few minutes.