Originally Posted by Peet

Undaunted by the general putdown by a believer in Nokia's paid engineers with education and experience I'm going to throw this into the idea blender.

From Slashdot:

"Researchers at Carnegie Mellon demonstrate 'popping out' touch screen buttons to become physical buttons using pneumatics. The idea is to combine the dynamic reconfigurability of touch screen buttons with the tactile feedback of real buttons. The technology could be applied where tactile feedback is currently lacking, such as in car navigation systems, ATMs, or cell phones."