With the meteoric rise of touchscreens physical keys have rather become old hat, or old button, if (bad) puns are your thing. Pressy, a company on Kickstarter has launched a project to bring the button back to smartphones.
The project is based on the premise that smartphones are great, but getting them to perform simple tasks, like turning on your phone’s flashlight might become tedious or even time consuming.
Pressy is a tiny physical button that connects to your phone via the headphone jack. That done you have to download the Pressy app, for free, which will then allow you to use the hardware.
The app comes with three default actions:
One short click to toggle your flashlight, A long click to toggle your phone in and out of silent mode and double click to snap a photo.
Pressy also has more advanced features that you can use as you get more proficient with the device. Some of the more advanced features are checking into social networks, sending your current location, starting voice recording and so forth.
You can check out their site on Kickstarter here. So far, the Pressy will only be available for Android phones, but iOS support may be on the horizon.
As an aside: on their site, the company states that turning on your phone’s flashlight can take up to 8 seconds, and also necessitates constant eye contact with the screen. The Pressy team challenges people to try and do it in less time.
Smartphone Olympic Games anyone?
Source: Techcrunch
