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iPhone 6S New Feature: Force Touch
New submitter WarJolt writes: Apple is adding Force Touch to their iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus. I'm not sure if Force Touch enough to convince an Android user like myself to switch, but there are definitely some interesting possibilities for app developers. A challenge for App developers will be to make apps compatible with both Force Touch iPhones and non-force touch iPhones. (Here's the Bloomberg report Forbes draws from.)
Android has pressure sensitive styluses. Which have also been available for iOS for years. This is Force Touch, which as it's name implies is about measuring the force of finger touches. Android doesn't have it.
the only thing i can think of that would get me to switch to ios over android would be if they came out of the box with the ability to sideload apps without jailbreaking
It has this. Just enroll the device as a developer device, and compile the code, or enroll it as a corporate device, if you want to use precompiled code you trust but that Apple won't allow into the App store because Apple doesn't trust it.
If you mean thing like side-loading just random crap, like if I were a private detective hired by your wife, and had 60 seconds of access to your iPhone, I could sideload some serious backdoor onto your phone to enable me to monitor your texts, phone calls, email, Facebook, and so on ... I'm pretty sure no one wants someone else to be able to load that kind of crap on their phones, but if you can do it, they can do it, too.
Your force touch trackpad does not "click" (no traditional hinge movement). The taptic engine behind the track pad simulates the click feeling for click depth without the surface depressing.
So, every time you do or have "clicked" your track pad, you have used the force touch feature.
Secondly, force touch on the Apple Watch works beautifully and will be useful on the iPhone too. Different use cases. Contextual menus in iOS apps will be a great addition.
>Which have also been available for iOS for years.
Ummm... what? I haven't seen any iOS devices with WACOM or N-Trig... everything available for iOS devices has been the high-tech equivalent of fingerpainting.
No, it really doesn't.
Look at the teardown of the MBPr's trackpad - it doesn't physically have a clickable button any more. It is 100% exclusively totally (just for redundancy) controlled via haptic feedback.
It does not physically click. Not even a little bit.
It is a flat plate with no moving parts that has a haptic feedback device fixed to it.
WACOM you say? Yes they do them for iOS.
http://uk.pcmag.com/tablets/13...
And there are several other companies that also do pressure sensitive styluses for iOS.
OK, from the top then :D
Traditional tablet PCs with WACOM styluses have existed for ages - over 10 years. They use an active digitizer (built into the screen) combined with an inductive stylus, which has a pressure-sensitive tip and does not require a battery. It's the same technology WACOM uses for its separate graphics tablets, which is why the pens are, in many cases, interchangeable - I can use the pen from my graphics tablet for my tablet PC (in this case, a Samsung ATIV Smart PC tablet), for instance. This technology is highly accurate, works across the entire system (due to presenting as a [PS2 or similar] pointing device) and is highly compatible with all existing software. Many Windows and Android devices come with this hardware built in... others (such as Microsoft for their Surface line) have switched to WACOM's main competitor for these products, N-Trig - even more accurate, but require batteries in the pens AFAIK.
iOS devices such as iPads have no such hardware built in - they have a "fat finger" capacitive touch display and no native palm rejection due to the fact that if you turn off the capacitive touchscreen, well, you lose all input - WACOM systems automatically turn off the capacitive touch when the stylus comes within a few centimeters of the digitizer screen, which incidentally also allows hovering over the screen with the stylus as a pointing device. The workaround palm rejection algorithms in these "let's use capacitive touch as a crutch for a stylus" devices and apps are almost always universally horrible. I'm hoping WACOM figured out something better for the product you mentioned, but I kinda doubt it.
The accuracy is also quite horrendous - with most iPad styluses, you wouldn't be much worse off using a hot-dog instead.
Hence the complicated workaround for iOS with Bluetooth (for the pressure sensitivity) and the very slow performance - take a look here for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I dunno about you, but while the reviewer keeps talking about fast performance, I'd pretty much be pulling my hair out. That might be because of that Bamboo drawing app on the iPad though, and not because the Bluetooth connection is lagging (although that's a possibility too!).