[Elecraft] " Back to the Future - Morse Code and Cellular Phones"

Wed Jun 29 11:50:54 EDT 2005

  Published on The O'Reilly Network (http://www.oreillynet.com/)
  http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7016

Back to the Future - Morse Code and Cellular Phones
by Brian McConnell
Jun. 28, 2005

I've spent most of the past five or so years thinking about handheld 
devices, their limitations and how to work around them. Having worked 
with telephones since I was in high school, this has been something of 
an obsession.

The hot trend today is to cram every feature imaginable into mobile 
telephone handsets. This has led to some cool things like camera phones, 
mobile gaming, and such. The problem is that a lot of designers overlook 
some basic limitations in these devices, and more importantly, the 
situations in which people use them.

Cellular phones are all about mobility. Good mobility applications 
recognize that the user is often in motion (walking, driving, etc). 
Safety and convenience require that the application should demand as 
little visual attention as possible. Badly designed applications force 
the user to stare at the telephone's display instead of paying attention 
to surrounding environs. This is why speech user interfaces work so well 
for mobile users. They allow the user to interact with a service in a 
"heads up" stance, without looking at the phone. Unfortunately, most 
mobile applications are of the badly designed "let's take a PC interface 
and shrink it down" category.

Text messaging is an enormously popular service, but it too suffers from 
this basic user interface conflict. Sending and receiving text messages 
requires the user to look at the display. Receiving messages can be done 
at a glance, so this is not such a burden. Sending them is another 
story. Some people are adept at tapping messages on numeric keypads, but 
doing so requires the user to pay attention to the display. Try writing 
a text message without looking at the phone. Not easy.

"Tapping"

Morse Code, or a derivative of it, could be one way to solve this 
problem. With Morse Code, one could tap text messages out without 
looking at the telephone, and without having to fumble with ever smaller 
keypads. I'll admit that the idea of resurrecting Morse Code seems 
improbable, but then it's worth remembering that only a few years ago, 
the idea of people typing with their thumbs also seemed absurd.

How might Morse be incorporated into a telephone handset. I sketched out 
a fairly simple interface. Here's what I came up with.

The telephone would have a fairly large pressure sensitive panel on its 
back side, big enough that you would not have to look at the phone to 
locate it. It might also be possible to use the telephone's existing 
microphone to sense taps (although discriminating between short and long 
pulses could be a problem).

You'd send messages in a couple of different ways depending on how you 
were carrying the phone at the time. I devised a couple of tweaks to 
make the process of sending messages faster.

When carrying the phone at your side, you could send messages with one 
hand by tapping on the back of the phone in the convention dot (short) 
and dash (notation). The panel would interpret a brief pulse as a dot, a 
longer pulse as a dash. Timing is important, so this method of sending 
messages takes more practice.

With both hands free or with the phone resting on a surface, you could 
use a slightly different method to tap messages. Holding the phone in 
one hand and tapping with the other, you'd tap the panel with your 
fingernail to send a dot, and with your whole fingertip to send a dash. 
Timing is much less important here, so this method will be easier for 
people to learn.

Receiving messages is less of an issue, since they'll arrive as text 
messages. The sending telephone will convert the tapped dots and dashes 
into alphanumeric messages to be sent via SMS or IP. The receiving 
telephone will display these in the usual way (an option to play 
messages via text to speech synthesis would be a nice add-on, and as 
mobile phones become more powerful, should be easy enough to do).

Hands-Free Mobile Phone Features

Incorporating a Morse Code key into the back of a telephone handset has 
other uses besides tapping text messages. One of the things this enables 
you to do is to make it easier to control a telephone in hands-free mode.

For example, you could design the phone so that it recognizes certain 
codes as keypad commands, primarily for deciding how to deal with 
incoming calls.

.. = answer call
... = send call to voice mail
.... = forward call to preprogrammed number

So while you're driving along, you could dispatch incoming calls as 
desired by tapping on the back of the handset, something you could do 
heads up, without taking your eyes off the road.

While this isn't Morse Code per se, it's the same idea, and it should be 
easy to train users to learn a handful of short two or three digit codes 
as in the example above. This is probably more realistic than training 
users to compose SMS messages in Morse, as anybody can memorize a 
handful of tap sequences.

Back to the Future

I'll admit this may seem like a bit dated, but even with a Treo 600, I 
find it difficult to type text messages. It seems to me that something 
like this is worth a try. The cost of embedding this in a handset should 
be pretty minimal compared to that of other features like digital 
cameras. You're basically talking about a small plate attached to a 
piezo-electric sensor, which is about as simple as it gets. Even better 
if you can make this work using a phone's existing microphone to sense taps.

Would people actually use this? I don't know. It's hard to tell what 
will catch on. I thought ringtones and camera phones were improbable at 
best, and now those are both billion dollar industries. If something 
like this makes it easier to use SMS, then my guess is that it will 
catch on, at least with a subset of users.

While the Morse Code application may not catch on outside a small group 
of power users, the idea of using Morse-like code to control a telephone 
in hands-free mode makes a lot of sense. Tap twice to answer a call 
while driving, three times to send it to voice mail, four times to 
forward the call to your secretary. That'll be easier that opening the 
phone and pushing a key while driving, and a heck of a lot safer.

Brian McConnell is the founder of Trekmail, a mixed-media messaging 
service provider. An inventor, serial entrepreneur, and author, he also 
wrote Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien 
Civilizations.

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