The Future in Smartphones: Squeezable Phones?

Yes, a squeezable phone. What does that even mean, you might ask? Every phone is squeezable - we've all held on to our devices very tightly as we walk near open water, or as we lean over the railing to get the perfect picture. But it may seem that smartphones of the future (and present) will have another practical use for holding them so tight.

This summer, tech company HTC announced their new flagship device, HTC U11, which sported a quirky new design element - Edge Sense; the frame of this phone is pressure-sensitive. Sensors in the frame allow the phone to detect changes in your grip and give you new options for how you control your phone. A squeeze can take you into the camera app and take a picture, without ever touching the screen, or you can customize the settings to enact a number of different shortcuts.
Considering HTC's lack of popularity in the smartphone market lately, this random new idea seemed to have no future. Similar to Force Touch when it originally came out, this feature doesn't seem to have much of a point. More than likely, squeezable phones would have died off with the next round of flagships next year, except that it caught the eye of a tech giant.

Last month, Google announced the buyout of a part of HTC's smartphone development team. This month, Google released the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2XL smartphones with a neat new feature - they're squeezable. What seemed to be a random feature at first has become adopted by one of the largest companies on the smartphone market, the Android super giant. If Google thought it was worth investing 1.1 billion dollars in this feature, and feature's like these to come, then quite possibly this is the kind of feature we will see more of in future phones.


images from: https://mobilesyrup.com/2017/09/04/htc-u11-review/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/4/16405192/new-google-pixel-2-xl-phone-photos-video-hands-on