Foreign media predicts this year's mobile phone trend: There will be more and more mobile phones without physical buttons

Over the years, mobile phones have increasingly tended to be full-screen designs, and physical keyboards, Home buttons, and headphone jacks have been eliminated one after another. Next, physical buttons for controlling power and volume may also be eliminated from the stage of history, and mobile phones without physical buttons will appear more and more. Last week, at the CES (International Consumer Electronics Show) held in Las Vegas, two companies demonstrated prototype designs of smartphones without physical buttons.

Imagine a phone with no dedicated volume or power buttons, but if you tap certain areas of the edge of the borderless screen, the phone will respond as if you just pressed the power button or flipped the volume control.

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Sensel's buttonless smartphone prototype uses sensors on both sides to detect how hard your fingers are pressing on it. It then turns the volume up or down depending on where you press.

In the next few years, there's a good chance that most smartphones will supplement physical buttons with digital ones, or replace them entirely. This transition has already begun. The HTC U12 Plus, launched in 2018, was one of the first phones to use only pressure-sensitive buttons. More recently, Asus' ROG Phone 2 (which has physical buttons) also used some touch-sensitive areas as invisible shoulder buttons, which are handy for certain types of video games. For the past four years, Google's Pixel phones have also allowed you to summon Google Assistant with a simple touch.

Phones from HTC and Asus use the same technology from Sentons, a San Jose, Calif.-based company. Sentons relies on a combination of piezoelectric sensors and strain gauges to simulate physical buttons. Its piezoelectric sensors use ultrasound to identify the position of your finger on the side of the phone, while the strain gauges measure force through surface tension.

When Asus' new ROG Phone 2 is in landscape mode, its sensors can act as invisible shoulder buttons.

Remi Lacombe, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Sentons, admitted that the iteration of the technology built into the HTC U12 Plus phone is not perfect (a Wired reporter who used the phone also found the experience disappointing, saying that its digital buttons always triggered when they should not), but he also talked about the ROG Phone 2, saying that sensor technology has improved since the phone appeared. He is right. The invisible shoulder buttons on Asus' latest phone are much faster in response time, and the added benefit is that they provide an extra layer of control when users play games. The prototype phone that Sentons showed at CES also responded quickly to the touch of the experiencer, and was extremely accurate and had no delay.

But why do we want to get rid of physical buttons? They have served us perfectly well over the past decade. Lacombe believes there are three reasons, the first of which is to bring better industrial design to mobile phones. Designers who have been pursuing the concept of "seamless integration" in mobile phones can finally achieve this goal because the design of the side of the phone does not have to be disturbed by physical buttons.

Another reason, Lacombe said, is to accommodate emerging technologies like 5G and waterfall displays, a new type of phone screen design that stretches from the front of the phone to the sides. Think of Samsung's Galaxy phones and their wraparound displays, but with more usable screens.

"There are space constraints on phone design," Lacombe said. He explained that to support 5G, antennas will take up a lot of space on the outside edge of the phone. If designers want to introduce a waterfall screen that wraps around the body more completely (that is, a 120-degree waterfall screen), there will be no room for physical buttons on the sides of the phone.

The argument for eliminating space constraints is valid. It’s the same argument Apple used to defend its decision to remove the headphone jack from the iPhone: it needed more internal space to accommodate advanced components.

One thing Lacombe isn't sure is whether removing physical buttons will backfire as much as removing the headphone jack, because going fully digital can allow for a more personalized user experience. For example, a left-handed user can put the power button on either side of the phone. Want a dedicated camera shutter button? You can add it freely.

Phones that let you choose your own button layout make the user experience not only more personalized, but also more enriched. For example, you can imagine how adding different buttons around the phone would affect the mobile gaming experience - you wouldn't accidentally block your screen while playing games. Or when shooting video, it would be helpful to have a dedicated slider button to control the focus. In any case, none of this will happen overnight.

“Users are already very familiar with touch interfaces,” Lacombe said. “So you have to slowly get them used to new gestures and new user interfaces.”

Ilya Rosenberg agrees. Better phone design and better user interfaces are a key reason manufacturers want to go buttonless, she told Wired. Rosenberg is the CEO and co-founder of Sensel, a company that experiments with interaction design. Its first product, the Morph, is a desktop input device that senses touch pressure and can be used for everything from video editing to music production.

Rosenberg showed WIRED a prototype Android phone with Sensel sensors on both sides. These high-resolution sensors detect changes in resistance when a user applies pressure by measuring compression—which is different from Sentons' technology, which measures tension. Sensel's technology works even if you're wearing gloves or wrapping your phone in a protective case. Rosenberg said the Sensel system is also less restrictive. Technically, you can use it to add as many number buttons as you want, while Sentons' technology only allows you to set up three or four number buttons on the side of the phone.

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Sensel's buttonless Android phone prototype

Rosenberg said that when he showed off the Sensel prototype at CES, most people thought that a phone without buttons was a "natural evolution" because people had seen manufacturers gradually remove physical controls from phones over the years - first the physical keyboard, then the home button.

“People swore they would never give up physical keyboards, but now we have touchscreens,” Rosenberg said. “Everyone we showed it to said, ‘Yeah, that makes sense; it’s a trend.’ Industrial designers love clean, unobstructed surfaces.”

Rosenberg noted that user interfaces are increasingly controlled by software, citing Tesla vehicles as an example of how they rely more on touchscreens and digital buttons than physical buttons.

"When you get rid of physical buttons, you lose some things, like the ability to feel the physical buttons. So maybe you lose some muscle memory, but with software updates, your muscle memory will gradually adapt and evolve," he said.

Some problems will need to be solved by designers and others. Designers need to make sure that the power button, no matter where it is, can be used when the phone is off - not only to turn it on, but also to restart it. Haptic feedback also needs to be done very well so that users can actually feel the traditional feeling of pressing a button, which Apple has done with the Force Touch trackpad on MacBooks.

Apps should also be able to access these sensors — imagine swiping your finger on the side of a phone to scroll through your Instagram feed — and if companies like Google and Apple embrace digital buttons, it will be easier for app developers to support them, Lacombe said. Sentons is in discussions with Google about the issue, but even if Google eventually supports it, it won’t happen soon, Lacombe said.

Regardless, things are making progress. According to Lacombe, a mobile phone manufacturer will launch a phone using Senton technology at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February. Rosenberg also said that Sensel is working with a large laptop manufacturer this year to integrate its pressure sensors into the touchpad of the latter's laptop products.