If you believe recent reporting by Tech News Taiwan and UDN, Force Touch, one of the technologies behind the Apple Watch, could make its way into this year’s refresh of the iPhone 6, likely to be referred to as an ‘iPhone 6s’.
To get you quickly up to speed on Force Touch, it’s a handy feature that relies on a bunch of tiny electrodes around the Watch’s display that recognize the difference between a tap and a press, thereby providing the user with quick access to contextually specific controls.
But would Force Touch make sense on the iPhone, do you think?
If Apple were to implement Force Touch on its handset, it would need to rework the iOS user interface and introduce new tools so that developers could define custom options for when the screen is pressed.
It’s not entirely clear whether Force Touch is limited to detecting a press or if it can identify its location on the screen as well. In case of the latter, the user could be presented with options related directly to the task at hand.
Even better, in this scenario Force Touch might be able to detect on-screen objects being pressed so users could accomplish tasks with fewer taps and never get lost in the menus.
So, can Force Touch improve productivity of iPhone users and reduce the number of taps and on-screen menus? Or, would it be just a gimmick on a smartphone and should instead lend itself to being used on wearable devices exclusively?
I’ll let you be the judge of that so cast your vote below and chime in with your thoughts and observations in the comment section.
I think there’s some merit to this rumor.
Whenever Apple debuts a device with some new thing, it usually rolls out that technology to other products, if it makes sense. For example, Multi-Touch debuted on the iPhone back in 2007 but is now used extensively on all iOS devices.
Same with Retina screens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-waTi8BPdk#t=207
Adopted by the iPhone 4 back in 2010, Retina technology then made its way to Mac notebooks, and most recently started appearing on desktops with the introduction of the new 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display.
Why should Force Touch be any different?