Day: September 26, 2015

It does sound like a cool feature.

3D Touch Is Apple’s New Secret Weapon

Techcrunch – By: John Biggs – “I’m here to praise Apple again. Sorry. I have to do it. It’s not in my contract nor am I paid to do it – imagine if we were! We’d be rich! – but after manhandling the iPhone 6S Plus it’s abundantly clear that Apple has discovered another breakthrough. And they are surprisingly nonchalant about it.

Apple’s first interface breakthrough happened when it unleashed real multitouch on the world. Until the original iPhone, screens reacted to one single point and often required a stylus to operate. There were exceptions, but even after the iPhone launched competitors couldn’t keep up and had to release capacitive screen phones until they could join in the multi-touch game.

This next interface trick is far more subtle. By sensing pressure applied on the surface of the Apple Watch, the new MacBook trackpad, and the new iPhones, Apple has added a new layer to the touchscreen experience. In short, they have gone deep, allowing us to move past surfaces and into more dynamic menu systems and even UI tactics. As it stands 3D touch is pretty boring right now but imagine 3D touching into an MRI scan or anatomy textbook. Imagine 3D touching through the cosmos. Imagine 3D touching in games where you focus with a little pressure. There is a clear reason Apple abandoned the moniker of ‘Force Touch:’ what their experience offers has less to do with force and a lot more to do with a three dimensional experience.

3D Touch isn’t an incremental update. It is a real tool and you can be sure that, by CES time, manufacturers from Samsung to Xaomi will be offering stuff called Push Touch, Deep Finger, and Insert UI for their phones. It is inevitable. And Apple had it first.

This is not to say I don’t appreciate what competitors have brought to the table. Samsung’s Edge series is one of the most compelling and amazing screen technologies to reach the market in a long time and many manufacturers are doing things with materials and design that is to be commended. But non of them have released anything that intrinsically changes how we, as humans, interact with the slabs of glass and metal we hold in our pockets at all times. That’s a unique thing.

I’m not saying Force Touch has changed the world. What it has done is tweak the world in a very meaningful way. Apple’s products are starting to hit more senses. Thanks to haptics the iPhone and the Apple Watch are able to tap into our nervous system. In that case, Apple nuzzles us, offering a feather flick of interaction. Interestingly, I’m already feeling ‘phantom taps’ even when I wear a mechanical watch, a sign that old Pavlov was right.

With 3D Touch, The Apple devices ask us to touch them with a little more intent, to move past the glass and into something deeper behind the surface. This is an important change in how we use our phones and one sure to be successful. Of all of the other improvements in these new phones, 3D Touch is the most compelling and it is the one so subtle that Apple itself didn’t really talk it up during the keynote or briefings. ‘By the way,’ they seemed to say. ‘You can now stick your finger through the phone. No big deal.’

Apple hasn’t dented the universe in a while but they have tapped it with lots of force. They’ll ding it eventually, but until then we can all enjoy the odd ‘Tick’ of this latest feature.”

I may have found my new phone!

Nexus 6P Presentation Leak Includes More Images, Confirms Metal Body, Gorilla Glass 4, And 3450mAh Battery

Android Police – By: Michael Crider – “The leaks continue to flow out of Mountain View. The latest information on Huawei’s Nexus 6P, the larger and presumably more expensive of the two Nexus devices Google is expected to announce next week, comes from a public image gallery posted to Imgur. It’s a series of slides that appear to be designed for retail employees to use as an information and promotional tool. The slides include a set of hardware specifications and new photos.

By the way, that metal body means that the phone probably doesn’t feature wireless charging, but I’d be amazed if Qualcomm’s quick charging wasn’t included.

Slides dedicated to the camera and fingerprint sensor don’t reveal much that we didn’t already know – the marketing text says the camera ‘allows in more light,’ which probably just means a low F-stop value. The first slide in the deck includes a mention of Gorilla Glass 4, the latest design of enhanced tempered glass from Corning.

Other slides include more information on the benefits of Android 6.0 Marshmallow and Now on Tap, which most of you should be familiar with, and the last slide confirms that the Nexus 6P will be available in 32, 64, and 128GB capacities. Based on the Aluminium, Graphite, Frost, and Gold color choices, it looks like the body is made of aluminum (which is hardly surprising). And apparently that Gold color will only be available in Japan, at least during the initial launch of the phone. Google has a habit of releasing new colors late into a Nexus phone life cycle, so take that for what it’s worth.

One last tidbit: one of the slides includes a slightly angled photo of the rear of the Nexus 6P, which shows that the camera ‘bump’ so commonly derided in previous leaks may be less noticeable than we had hitherto thought. It’s still there, certainly, but it’s not quite as pronounced as it looked in other renders and leaked photos.

There’s still a few things we haven’t been able to confirm: the price, still unmentioned, and the display panel type, though IPS-LCD seems most likely. Google will announce the Huawei Nexus 6P, along with the LG Nexus 5X (and probably a few other things), in San Francisco on September 29th.”