One day, smartphones will be reduced to their simplest, most elemental form: a single slab of glass. That's what shows like Black Mirror, The Expanse, and even (yes[1]) Parks & Recreation like to tell us. I've always thought that future was a ways off, but HTC is apparently ready to get the ball rolling.
HTC’s new U12 Plus (styled U12+ by HTC themselves) has completely eliminated physical buttons. It has spots on its sides that resemble volume and power buttons, but they’re really just pressure-sensitive bumps that make a clicky vibration when you push ‘em. If the lack of buttons sounds strange, you should know that HTC made the sides of its phone pressure sensitive, too. You can squeeze it to open apps or perform actions like zooming on a map.
It’s fun to see a phone maker experiment with new concepts, and it’s hard not to root for HTC, one of the smartphone pioneers[2]. But, sometimes change for the sake of change turns ugly—this time, the price of said change was my sanity.
Under Pressure
The U12 Plus never behaves. It’s tricksy like those hobbitses[3]—always up to something. Sometimes the screen shuts off when I pick it up, or the camera app springs to life on its own. Other times I’ll successfully unlock it and accidentally shut the screen off again.
It gets up to the most mischief when it's in my pocket. Without fail, if I’m walking around it will somehow unlock itself and start doing something nefarious. I’ve gotten used to feeling that annoying vibration, telling me that I need to turn my phone's screen off again. For a while I had...