From the "You Learn Something New Every Day" department:

Just sat in on a meeting with a company called Immersion, which has created a platform for haptics -- tactile responses in smartphones. That means when you touch a button on a device screen, you essentially feel a click, vibration or some other kind of "mechanical" response from the software.  This is to provide an enhanced user experience, which is becoming a big area of differentiation for smartphone providers. They demo'd a guitar app that allowed you to "feel" the pluck of a string, or the strum of a chord, and they created some great tactile effects for the game "Angry Birds." In its most basic form, haptics software triggers the phone's motor to activate vibration, and the Immersion software can morph those vibrations into a number of different effects. The Immersion platform currently is OEM'd to device manufacturers who wish to build this capability into the phone, which can then be leveraged by applications written to the Immersion API. Immersion has some new things coming out next month; watch out for Victoria Reitano's story on the subject, which will appear in the March issue of SD Times and on sdtimes.com