This is a workaround for the near-total lack of buttons on modern phones.
If phone makers would bring back physical buttons and let users do stuff with them, pressy wouldn't exist. Of course, the trick with putting buttons around a phone is that you have to be careful about which ones you use - I accidentally hit buttons on my Samsung Focus near-constantly because they decided it would be good to include a "camera" button that instantly drops what your doing and jumps you over to the camera app. And a similar "search" face-button.
But really, a pair of unbound L/R shoulder buttons that apps could interpret however they liked (or ignore if it's a portrait-mode app) with no usage on the home-screen? Who wouldn't want that? Would be fantastic for gaming, for camera/AR apps, things like that.
But no, because suddenly everybody think they're Steve Jobs and the phones must have perfectly clean lines, we're left with nothing but hypersensitive capacitive face-buttons and if you want something that actually clicks you have to buy a Nintendo DS.
> But no, because suddenly everybody think they're Steve Jobs and the phones must have perfectly clean lines,
Real buttons are expensive and they fail. Including buttons increases design cost, tooling costs, component cost, build and test cost. It increases the reject rate of the phones. It makes the MTBF worse.
It's a great idea, though. Just two buttons would be awesome, and I can imagine many uses for them.
I think hardware buttons is not very expensive. Typical Android phone cost is about $300, price for dumb phone with hardware keyboard started from $30.
Hardware keyboard on my Nokia 2630 still works without problems after about 4 years of daily usage.
Lack of hardware buttons is on of reasons, why I still don't use smartphone.
They do increases cost and failure rate, but not nearly enough to be an excuse for not having buttons.
Nokia makes incredibly cheap and incredibly durable phones with T9 and qwerty keypads. If I bought one, the 3G network it is designed for would be farmed for 5G before the keypad itself stopped working...
If phone makers would bring back physical buttons and let users do stuff with them, pressy wouldn't exist. Of course, the trick with putting buttons around a phone is that you have to be careful about which ones you use - I accidentally hit buttons on my Samsung Focus near-constantly because they decided it would be good to include a "camera" button that instantly drops what your doing and jumps you over to the camera app. And a similar "search" face-button.
But really, a pair of unbound L/R shoulder buttons that apps could interpret however they liked (or ignore if it's a portrait-mode app) with no usage on the home-screen? Who wouldn't want that? Would be fantastic for gaming, for camera/AR apps, things like that.
But no, because suddenly everybody think they're Steve Jobs and the phones must have perfectly clean lines, we're left with nothing but hypersensitive capacitive face-buttons and if you want something that actually clicks you have to buy a Nintendo DS.