Is 3D/Force Touch The Next Big Thing?

[poofyhairguy]

So just like expected Apple has included what is commonly known as Force Touch with the new iPhone 6s. Now that the smartphone form factor has plateaued this seems an obvious attempt to try and increase the depth of the experience before everyone moves to VR (wink).

What is everyone's thoughts on this new development in smartphone technology? Are you dying to get a smartphone with this feature?

 

[Eug]

TouchID is/was totally awesome. I love it.

10 fps burst mode is also great. I love that too.

Live Photos looks great, particularly for parents. I really want that. Perhaps not this year, but definitely by next year.

3D Touch sounds great, but I want to try it out first. I'll be testing on my wife's iPhone 6s. If it's totally frickin' awesome, then I might buy a 6s for myself. If it's merely great, then I might wait for the iPhone 7.

In contrast, I think cell phones with 40 MP images at this time are just stupid, esp. when the SoCs can barely keep up with the resolution.

BTW, this makes me wonder what the Phone 7 will bring. I'd like to see an edge-to-edge screen at least (among other things), to shave a few mm off the width.

EDIT:

Force Touch on the MacBook Pro trackpads is great. Very good feel.

Force Touch on the Retina MacBook is merely good. Slightly less convincing feel than on the MBP trackpads, at least after testing 3 different MacBooks and 3 different MBPs in the Apple Store.

However, the UI for Force Touch on the MacBooks appears completely different than the UI for the iPhones.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I don't really get the comparison to TouchID and I have seen that a lot when people describe the usage. TouchID had an obvious benefit- it replaces passwords, which super suck. Everyone has to deal with passwords, which makes TouchID an obvious win for everyone.

Personally I don't really like what I am seeing so far with force touch, hence why I made a thread. I am not a fan of force touch for three reasons:

1. It is going to hide app options in some menu that you have to know what you are doing to get to. Basically every reason why Apple got rid of the second mouse button (not wanting hidden menu options) applies to force touch. I think it is going to seriously confuse all those people who like a smartphone because it is a dumbed down computer ("How did you get to that option? Mine won't do that" or "Why is my phone doing two different things when I touch it twice?").

2. I don't want to be that exacting with my smartphone. I jab at my phone harder when I am stressed, rushed or compromised (like when I have to pinchzoom one-handed so I use my nose to do it) and it would take a LOT of personal training to vary how hard I peck at my phone to accommodate what I want to accomplish on there.

3. I don't see the killer application for its use yet. Yeah having your phone be a scale will make the iPhone the official phone of your local drug dealer, but from the demos most of what I see 3D/Force touch "doing" is to add options to a mobile app interface (aka the kinds of stuff you can just throw in some "settings" window on a mobile OS like Android that isn't so OCD-friendly). My friend keeps telling me force touch on his Apple Watch is a game changer, yet all he shows me it doing is altering cutesy watch faces. I don't get the use case.

I think the example of it in a Macbook trackpad is perfect because almost NO ONE uses that feature. Well, maybe 1% of Macbook owners do. Heck my sister started at a med school where they give EVERY student a Macbook and her fellow students acted like she was a WIZARD for just using multi-touch gestures the first day in class (she has had a Macbook for years). I think Apple has gone past the capabilities of their target market when you talk about multi-touch gestures or 3D Touch, as it is too demanding on the users to use the features correctly.

I would love to be missing something big about force touch though, and I can't wait to see what everyone says!

 

[Eug]

That's just it. 3D Touch is actually mostly single digit gestures, and it is supposed to simplify stuff people want like quick look and what not, without having to deal with long touch and stuff like that. It uses haptic response to make things more viable, because I could see this being quite finicky.

Which is one reason I want to test it out. If it doesn't work consistently well, it will be a failure. But if it's easy to use, and works consistently, I think it will be the next big thing.

BTW, when TouchID came, lots and lots of people said it was a gimmick. Maybe it is, but as far as gimmicks are concerned, it's great.

 

[poofyhairguy]

That's just it. 3D Touch is actually mostly single digit gestures, and it is supposed to simplify stuff people want like quick look and what not, without having to deal with long touch and stuff like that. It uses haptic response to make things more viable, because I could see this being quite finicky.

Which is one reason I want to test it out. If it doesn't work consistently well, it will be a failure. But if it's easy to use, and works consistently, I think it will be the next big thing.

Great points that I didn't consider. In a way it is the iPhone coming full circle I guess. It started off as a very skeuomorphic design to help people understand how to use it ("the 3D button looking thing is a toggle") which then went away as people got used to those devices. Maybe 3D Touch is the next generation of that, a way to make the touching more intuitive.

I will admit I am still skeptical though, if only because most people already KNOW the tricks to use a smartphone (long presses and pinch zooms and taptap vs tap etc). To me it feels like you have to make them unlearn what they have learned to benefit from force touch ("don't pinchzoom a photo in a way that you have done a billion times since 2007 anymore, just press harder on it"). Maybe I have a different opinions about the technological competence of the most lucrative part of the iOS market than Apple does.

BTW, when TouchID came, lots and lots of people said it was a gimmick. Maybe it is, but as far as gimmicks are concerned, it's great.

Actually I remember Touch ID getting some decent fanfare on launch. Android was already playing with alternative locks (like the disaster facelock), and futuristic predictions all the way back to Back to the Future 2 in 1989 expected us to have fingerprint readers in products now.

Maybe you are right though and I just didn't see it. I don't read the kind of sites that criticize the iPhone 5C because the circles on the official case don't line up (OCD ALERT), I read sites like this that went thermonuclear when Apple released a 64 bit SoC with only 1GB of RAM (and then did it AGAIN the next year).

Thank you for the input.