The arrival of the iPhone in 2008 didn’t just change the way we view mobile technology, it started the gradual shift from physical buttons to touch-based interfaces.
In the early years of the resultant smartphone war, many Android handset makers turned to physical inputs to offer some kind of advantage over Apple’s line of phones – Motorola’s Droid series had slide-out QWERTY keyboards, for example, while Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play was pitched as a console / phone hybrid, complete with ports of 32-bit PlayStation games – but these were very much the exception to the norm; the consumers had spoken, and buttons were on the way out.
Fast-forward to the present, and outside of RIM’s Android-based Blackberry line, the world of smartphones has largely turned its back on physical buttons. As screen sizes become ever larger, there’s simply no room for keys on the front of your typical smartphone (with the Galaxy S8, there’s not even space for the famous Home button, which has been unceremoniously relegated to the rear of the device), and the obsession with making handsets as svelte as possible means that bulky sliding keyboards are also becoming a rarity.
The Xperia Play’s wasted potential
For me, the …read more
Source:: techradar.com – Gaming
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