The tyranny of touch screens may be coming to an end.
Companies have spent nearly two decades cramming ever more functions onto tappable, swipeable displays. Now buttons, knobs, sliders and other physical controls are making a comeback in vehicles, appliances and personal electronics.
In cars, the widely emulated ultra-minimalism of Tesla’s touch-screen-centric control panels is giving way to actual buttons, knobs and toggles in new models from Kia, BMW’s Mini, and Volkswagen, among others. This trend is delighting reviewers and making the display-focused interiors of Tesla and its imitators feel passé.
Similar re-buttonization is occurring in everything from e-readers to induction stoves.
I want buttons on my phone too.
I want my iPhone button back. It was better. Swiping fucking sucks and it doesn’t work half the time.
I got 3 (Volume rocker and power) and it feels like plenty.
It’s been so long since I had more than 3 and I’m curious. I had an iPhone for work, that had a 4th, the home button on the bottom center of the touch screen and I hated that. What do you want from physical buttons on the phone?
I want the power button on my phone to protrude like an actual button so I can actually press it. The thing’s like 4mm wide and I’m supposed to somehow push this thing through the gap in the side of my case with my thumb that’s
5x~10x (just checked) the width of the button.As for other buttons, I wouldn’t mind physical buttons for the Android controls at the bottom, but not really a huge deal to me tbh.
Mine has the 2 for volume and 1 for power, as well as a toggle switch to change from silent, vibrate, and sound for the ringer which I quite like.
Feeling nostalgic for the blackberry?
Blackberry insisted on a 3-row thumboard on the face of the device. I want a 5-row slider, like Samsung’s Relay.
I’m nostalgic for it, but at the same time, I’d be nostalgic for 3.5 seconds if I used one again. People tend to forget how frustrating those devices could be too. I had several iterations of the blackberry, and everyone of them came with a lot of quirks that modern phones just don’t have. Sure, I sort of miss the tactile feel of buttons, but it was also a lot of work punching out long emails on them, and pocket lint did a real number on those things too.
Yeah I don’t care for tactile keyboards because swiping is so much faster.
My last phone before my first smart phone was basically a sidekick (it wasn’t actually a sidekick, but I don’t remember the actual name of it and the sidekick has a similar enough formfactor).
That thing’s texting keyboard was fucking rad. I could type so fucking fast on that. I really want a smart phone with that keyboard.
Maybe the answer is the same as the cases for the iPad mini. A little Bluetooth keyboard case that snaps closed over the screen, with capacity to flip the phone unit around, in case to lay screen up on top of it while closed.