If there is one feature of Samsung Galaxy Edge that divides loyalties among the Apple Fans, it is definitely the cool look of the edge screens on the Samsung devices. Using the edge double glass feature, you can essentially
- Display information without turning on the screen.
- Distinguish up to five contacts by displaying assigned colors.
- Communicate with favorite contacts quickly
As an Apple Fan, whether you like this or not, get ready for something that will be a little more dramatic if Apple follows through with the idea. After All, Think Differently has to stand for something!
In a Patent released this month, 9,354,786, Apple is attempting to mitigate some of the precision issues associated with plan vanilla touch screen displays. According to the Apple Patent, a future iPhone could have the ability to responds to taps on the sides of the phone as well.
For example, if the user taps on the right side of the iPhone, then the phone can responsively move a currently selected object leftward. Conversely, if the user taps on the left side of the device, then the device can responsively move the currently selected object rightward. Pretty cool!
This same technology can also help in producing interactions by tapping the top or bottom of the device.
Since the iPhone is not equipped with a mouse like precision, we have all encountered challenges when we are trying to select a block of text for copy/paste etc. This would make that precision easier.
Lets say that you are You have selected a block of text having a left-most selection boundary and a right-most selection boundary, then the iphone can first respond to your touching of one of those boundaries by making that boundary (either the left-most or right-most) the “active” boundary.
It can then respond to the your tapping on the side of your iPhone by moving the currently active boundary one text character away from the tapped side, thereby causing one more or one less (depending on the active boundary and the direction) text character to be included within the selected text.
The idea is that using this technique, the iPhone user can more easily refine the scope of the selected items to include slightly more or slightly fewer items and it introduces a cool user interaction method that could potentially applied to other applications such as games.