Manufacturers are slowly starting to listen to what car journalists and owners have been complaining about for almost a decade: Cramming all the car’s functions into a touchscreen is an inferior solution to having dedicated physical controls for key tasks.
Among the manufacturers known to be switching back to buttons is Volkswagen, whose latest vehicles have gone touch-control-crazy with functions either buried inside a touchscreen menu or relocated to an annoying haptic feedback panel.
We’ve known for a while that Volkswagen was considering putting back some buttons in its cars, but the manufacturer never officially acknowledged this. Now VW’s design boss, Andreas Mindt, has admitted to Autocar that this approach was a mistake and that the automaker is backtracking on this trend.
“From the ID.2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions—the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light—below the screen,” Mindt told Autocar. He added, “They will be in every car that we make from now on. We will never, ever make this mistake anymore. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing anymore. There’s feedback, it’s real, and people love this. Honestly, it’s a car. It’s not a phone.”
honestly, I’m all for buttons on phones too, I miss my sideout keyboard.
Even on “near 100% screen” devices, there’s still real estate on the side, for some function buttons, like
bixby, back, home, etc. My Windows Phone Nokia had a dedicated camera button that could have alternative functions in some applications.If you double click your power button it should bring up your camera
Especially for gaming. My old Nokia N81 kicked this rectangular piece of glass’s ass when it comes to gaming because I could actually comfortably play games that weren’t turn based and didn’t need to slap an overlay onto the screen.
https://youtu.be/Z3f4Q7DUT-U
I’m thinking about getting one of those
Damn, that definitely looks very cool. Probably expensive too lol. But exactly what these touchscreen phones need.
Well it is a nice young youtuber starting a startup using kickstarter. I think an investment is worth it 😇
Edit: 😯 way more expensive than I thought
You can get the same feeling with a Xbox controller and a phone mount for the controller. its not quite as cool looking but for $10 is the same experience. I have this one that I got like 2 years ago, it works great. Good money saver if you already have a controller that supports bluetooth. They have them for PS controllers too.
My favorite phone was my LG enV2 with the physical qwerty keyboard. Thing would keep its charge for weeks, and I could just chuck it across a room with no consequences. Not a smartphone obviously, but it was great for its time.