Mike Cane sent me the link to a Register entry today, about the My Touch Keys iPhone overlay. His exact words (which I have edited, because…yeah) were:

Ho ****! Back to the future! This **** was available for the TIMEX SINCLAIR at the time!!!!

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/03/26/my_touch_keys_iphone/

I can’t ****ing believe it’s back!! I wish I had thought of it. $20 a pop on ebay for a ****ing one-cent piece of plastic. ****!!!!

Even though Mike has a potty mouth (which may have been brought on by the 106F degree fever he is currently battling), he does have a point: sometimes old ideas have a way of reinventing themselves*. So let’s take a look at what got him so excited.

According to the My Touch Keys site, lack of tactile feedback is one of the biggest complaints facing the iPhone – and perhaps it is a major issue for some. This overlay is supposed to create the illusion of button boundaries when the iPhone is in portrait orientation, which will “intuitively guide” the user’s fingers to improve their keying over time. My Touch Keys is, as the Register pointed out, an after-market add-on which creates haptic feedback.

But it looks like James Sherwood, the Register articles author, found the same caveat I wondered about:

However, an MTK design flaw will appear as soon as you open the iPhone’s Safari web browser. Rotate the iPhone into landscape mode and Safari re-displays itself accordingly. So does the on-screen keyboard, so the cut-out keys won’t be aligned with the handset’s virtual ones in this instance.

photos courtesy of the My Touch Keys site

Although I think that the My Touch Keys overlay is an intriguing item, I also think that over time it will prove to be more of a nuisance than anything. Have any of you tried something like this? Would you want to?

*Mike looked for more information on the Timex Sinclair overlay on Google, but all he could find was this web document.