Touch screen phones have a few drawbacks. One of the major drawbacks is that you can’t feel the buttons on a virtual screen when you are typing. The other is that even when you are looking at the buttons you are pressing, you get no feedback from an onscreen keyboard like you do a real keyboard.

Several Nokia phones use Immersion touch screen technology to provide feedback through vibration when buttons on a touch screen are pressed. Immersion announced this week that it has joined the Symbian Foundation.

That means that Immersion’s haptics TouchSense technology is now available to all Symbian platform developers allowing the design of user experiences with the benefit of touch feedback. Immersion says that to date over 65 million handsets have shipped using its haptics technology. Immersion is also the firm behind the rumble effects in many video game controllers.

[via Immersion]