Users of PDA-phones like the i-Mate JAM are familiar with the frustration of trying to punch out numbers on a virtual keypad. Since there's no tactile feedback, it's hard to know which buttons you pressed, leading to a lot of misdialing and squinting at PDA-phone screens.

Immersion came by PC Labs earlier this week with a solution: a force-feedback PDA-phone screen. Like the kiosk demo we saw in May, this technology has the uncanny power to make you feel like you're pressing a real, physical key when you're just touching a screen.

Unlike Immersion's kiosk technology, the PDA-phone system doesn't actually vibrate the screen -- it uses a vibration motor in the body of the PDA/phone (the same one you'd use for vibrating alerts, or that Immersion uses in their VibeTonz phones.) So it isn't quite as convincing as the kiosk, but it's still uncanny. It doesn't feel like your phone is set to vibrate, it feels like you're pressing a button.

Immersion told me that this technology may appear in PDA-phones as soon as next year. While it doesn't require extra vibration motors, the motor in a phone needs to be in the right place, so they need to work with their partners (such as Samsung) to build phones that work well. I'm looking forward to it.