We Apple users get teased for the lack of buttons on our devices. Jony Ive continues he and the late Steve’s joint crusade against the button. The thing is, it’s a crusade against the unnecessary button, which is why we’ll always have a home button on our iPhones, a kind of ejector seat for when things go wrong.
Android, on the other hand, has no such qualms about bad, user-unfriendly design. Which is why it has fallen to two Kickstarterers to go out and make a button for Android devices, which often lack physical switches of any kind [1].
The Pressy is a physical switch that slots into your phone’s headphone socket and provides you with something to actually press. As it’s not built in to the phone itself, apps will have to incorporate support for it, but for Android owners used to not having their devices work for various reasons, this shouldn’t be a problem.
In fact, it seems like Androiders are desperate for this switch. So desperate that this famously tight-fisted bunch has coughed up a collective $132,000 in like a day, blowing past the $40,000 goal like their phones blow through battery power.
Which isn’t to say I don’t want a $20 Pressy for the iPhone: it could keep the lint out of the jack hole as well as providing a shortcut to — I don’t know — the flashlight? The problem is that it would mute the iPhone completely while in place.
Still, we’ll stay tuned. Just in case it makes it to the land of iOS.
Source: Kickstarter
- I’m not talking about volume buttons here. ↩
