In today’s digital age, it sometimes feels like hardware has taken a back seat to the software that drives our devices. Button of the Month is a monthly look at what some of those buttons and switches are like on devices old and new, and aims to appreciate how we interact with our devices on a physical, tactile level.
Feb 29
Today I learned about the ‘80s Casio calculator that doubles as a massive lighter.I wanted it to be February’s Button of the Month — partly because its big honking button has an incredible click and shoots out a monster jet of flame, partly because it triples as an alarm clock (!), and partly ‘cuz it hearkens back to Casio’s original invention: a finger ring for cigarettes.
Sadly, the Casio QL-10 seems rare. Last time one hit eBay, it sold for $499. Behold history through other people’s cameras in our gallery instead:
1/7
Jan 31
The Indiglo button let there be light
Long before the self-lit pixels of OLED phones illuminated our lives, there was a time many portable gadgets didn’t shine at all. Remember when the display of practically every Nintendo Game Boy was designed to be viewed by sunlight? Remember when it was tough to tell time with your average wristwatch after dark?
Read Article >But in 1992, Timex popularized a push-button technology that could bathe any small display in a soothing, sea-green glow. And even though the actual button was often bad, it literally changed the face of portable electronics.
Nov 30, 2023
The forbidden popcorn button.Technology Connections is a phenomenal YouTube channel, and I have no qualms letting Alec’s latest video take the place of our regularly scheduled Button of the Month for December — it’s very good.
I got a tad too busy with daily live courtroom reporting and some gaming handhelds to write or edit this month’s column, but I promise it’ll be back in January! Hint: think blue.
Oct 31, 2023
8BitDo’s NES buttons are a big, red, Nintendo-themed invitation to experiment
When you think about it, adding two extra buttons to a keyboard, a peripheral that already has dozens of keys built in, is kind of ridiculous. Why add more buttons when so many modern keyboards already let you customize their existing keys to do exactly what you want? Are you really so attached to your dusty old Pause Break key that you’re not prepared to reassign it?
Read Article >And yet, the appearance alone of 8BitDo’s Dual Super Buttons offers half the answer. The peripheral buttons are giant, red, and look like you should be yelling “fire the torpedoes” with every press. Even if you don’t immediately have a use for them, they have a playful and fun design that makes you want to experiment and seek one out. You buy a functional, understated device like the Stream Deck because you have a use for it. You buy the Dual Super Buttons because you want to find a use.
Oct 1, 2023
TIL someone got the amazing analog Space Command remote to control Alexa.No batteries, no infrared — just the original “clicker” TV remote’s ultrasonic pings translated into digital commands by an Arduino computer, which then speaks in a robotic voice to get Alexa to do your bidding.
Here’s our Button of the Month about the 1956 gadget — and its service manual.
Sep 25, 2023
The Action Button is the most significant new iPhone feature in years
The most significant new thing in the iPhone 15 Pro this year isn’t its lighter titanium frame, new A17 Pro processor, or its camera system (although all are appreciated). For me, it’s the Action Button: the little button above the volume keys that replaces the mute switch that had been on every iPhone since the very first one.
Read Article >The Action Button is perhaps the biggest hardware upgrade the iPhone line has received in years. It’s not a particularly advanced piece of technology — it’s literally just a button — but its programmability lets you use your iPhone in completely new ways.
Aug 31, 2023
This USB button helps Jeopardy! contestants get their buzz on
The press of a single button can mean the difference between winning thousands of dollars on national television — or winning nothing at all. Jeopardy!’s buzzer is arguably the most infamous game show button; over the past 59 years, the “signaling device” has become a behind-the-scenes character of its own. The button on a stick inspires future contestants to train their hand-eye coordination, reaction time, and handling, all in an attempt to gain mere milliseconds over the competition.
Read Article >How do you practice such a specific skill set? Jeopardy!’s producers don’t hand out buzzers. Many players have used clicky pens or Pez dispensers to simulate the signaling device, but you can’t measure milliseconds of improvement that way.
Aug 7, 2023
Mechanical marvel.We recently re-introduced you to a TV remote for the ages, the Zenith Space Command, which uses tiny hammers and tuning forks instead of electricity! That means no batteries :-)
Here’s a closer look... and we even pulled out our screwdriver to give you a peek inside.
Jul 12, 2023
We defeated bad elevator buttons!Remember when we we shared the utterly infuriating elevator buttons stationed in our very own offices? They’ve been vanquished!
Now, instead of every soul aboard a crowded elevator stabbing a keypad in disbelief, a single tap and a single touchscreen press simultaneously summons the elevator, programs it to visit the appropriate floor(s), and points YOU in the right direction. And friends, the doors... they open instantly. Smartest elevators I’ve ever seen.
May 31, 2023
The unsung heroes of the Apple Watch are its hidden buttons
In the wide world of wristwatches, there is no easier way to dress to your aesthetic or customize your timepiece than by swapping straps and bands. There are all kinds of straps out there, from nylon NATOs and leather bund straps to hotly debated metal link bracelets. Most watch straps are universal across similarly sized traditional watches, an open ecosystem for anyone to explore.
Read Article >But none are as simple and convenient as the proprietary little band release buttons on the underside of every Apple Watch.
Apr 30, 2023
The Stream Deck mastered the LCD key by making it peripheral
Like many great products, the Elgato Stream Deck wasn’t exactly a new idea.
Read Article >When the very first one debuted six years ago this month, we instantly compared it to Art Lebedev’s legendary Optimus Maximus keyboard, which promised an array of swirling OLED screens under your fingertips an entire decade earlier. Razer, too, pioneered LCD keys before their time, tacking them onto a keyboard and the company’s very first Blade laptop.
Mar 31, 2023
Fitbit’s attempt to disappear the button proved why they matter
It’s easy to see why gadget makers are so fixated on touchscreens. Swiping is intuitive. It enables sleek lines for a futuristic aesthetic. It’s the easiest way to banish bezels and maximize screen real estate. So I understood why Fitbit was chuffed when it introduced the inductive button on the Fitbit Charge 3. Begone side button protrusion, and behold the slim profile of a modern fitness tracker!
Read Article >This is what an unforced error looks like.
Feb 28, 2023
The grill ignition button is a reminder of happy summer days
It is 28 degrees Fahrenheit on top of this mountain, before you factor in the wind that’s blowing snow sideways into my face. I’m sitting on a rock with my soda can-sized backpacking stove the size of a soda can trying to make lunch and regretting my decision to go hiking in the middle of February. I press a small button on a pen-size rod that I’m holding over the burner, bringing a spark to life for just an instant. The familiar whoosh of gas igniting means I can start heating up ramen — lucky me.
Read Article >But wait, how did pressing that button cause a spark? My lighter doesn’t have a flint and steel or any batteries. It’s not even solar powered (not that I remember what sunlight looks like; it’s winter in Washington). So how can it start a fire? Magic? No, it’s actually an interesting quirk of physics and material science. Come, sit by this sad replacement for a campfire with me, and I’ll tell you how it works using an example from happy summer days rather than miserable winter afternoons.
Jan 31, 2023
The Nintendo Switch showed us we deserve more from joysticks
Every evening, my kids beg for “Mario,” and I know what that means — watching their old man wrestle with a pair of Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers while hopefully saving a princess. It’s not always easy timing tricky jumps in Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine, especially not when the controls are fighting you.
Read Article >That’s not a lame dad excuse: we beat both games, and we’re on to Super Mario Galaxy now. But I can’t count how many times Joy-Con drift sent my mustachioed plumber plunging to his doom. When my left Joy-Con died, Mario started walking off edges all by himself. Now, my right Joy-Con is a distracted boyfriend meme, its erroneous joystick signals always aiming me in the wrong direction. This’ll be my third set of Joy-Cons in five years, and I’ve had enough.
Dec 30, 2022
The button on Canon’s image-stabilized binoculars unlocked superhuman sight
From pirates to spies to kid detectives, it’s a common Hollywood trope: hold a simple spyglass or binoculars up to your eyes, and you’ll get a crystal-clear cylindrical picture of what’s going on.
Read Article >That’s horseshit, of course. Unless you’ve got the hands of a surgeon, it’s surprisingly hard to line up eyeballs, multiple pieces of glass, and a faraway subject. Kid Sean was sad to learn that fact. But I’ll never forget the day Teen Sean pressed the magic button that made all the difference: the button atop the image-stabilized binoculars that Canon still sells today.
Jul 30, 2022
The Google Pixel’s squeeze for assistant was a button without a button
The Pixel 2 is an almost five-year-old phone, but it introduced a feature that I miss more and more with each passing year. It was called Active Edge, and it let you summon Google Assistant just by giving your phone a squeeze. In some ways, it’s an unusual idea. But it effectively gave you something sorely lacking on modern phones: a way to physically interact with the phone to just get something done.
Read Article >Looking at the sides of the Pixel 2 and 2 XL, you won’t see anything to indicate that you’re holding anything special. Sure, there’s a power button and volume rocker, but otherwise, the sides are sparse. Give the phone’s bare edges a good squeeze, though, and a subtle vibration and animation will play, as Google Assistant pops up from the bottom of the screen, ready to start listening to you. You don’t have to wake the phone up, long-press on any physical or virtual buttons, or tap the screen. You squeeze and start talking.
Jun 30, 2022
The Steam Deck’s best button is its software
The Steam Deck has a lot of buttons. There’s a D-pad, all the typical face buttons, two control sticks that also respond to capacitive touch and can be pushed down like buttons, two trackpads with haptic feedback that are also pressure-sensitive buttons, two shoulder bumpers, two analog shoulder triggers, and four buttons on the back of the device behind the grips.
Read Article >Somehow, they all feel like they’re exactly in the right place while you’re holding the device, and in writing the latest in our long-running Button of the Month series, you might think that I’d wax poetic about just one of them. But for me, the true magic of the Steam Deck is that any button can be the awesome button, thanks to the device’s excellent software.
May 31, 2022
The push-button ignition was a luxurious way to start your car until it wasn’t
The first time I started a car by pressing a button, it felt too easy and convenient — like I had somehow stumbled into a tax bracket I don’t belong in. “You’re telling me,” I thought, “that I can just leave my keys in my pocket, and the car will let me get in and drive around?”
Read Article >The push-button ignition is one of those buttons that doesn’t really add any new functionality over the thing it’s replacing (in this case, the ignition system that has you insert and turn a key). It exists solely for the sake of convenience, a job that it excels at. You get in the car, press down on the brake pedal and a button, and you’re ready to drive. It’s barely more difficult than unlocking your phone.
Apr 29, 2022
The Mr. Coffee ‘brew now’ button is an escape from sleepiness
In the age of aesthetically pleasing morning routines, a cheap electric coffee maker can feel a bit dated — something to begrudgingly use at the office rather than a gadget that brings joy to your kitchen. And while I love the fancy coffee gadgets that require a manual, multi-step ritual, there’s one thing that makes me turn to a standard Mr. Coffee machine every morning: its dead-simple “brew now” button that instantly starts the process of getting caffeine into my body.
Read Article >The single-button operation means I don’t have to navigate the complexities of brewing temps or ratios while I’m still half-asleep. I just press it, it lights up, and the machine gurgles to life, heating up water and pushing it up a tube onto the coffee grounds I’ve added to it. The only decision I have to make is how much coffee I’ll need to get through the day.
Mar 31, 2022
The BlackBerry Storm showed why you should never turn a touchscreen into a button
In 2007, the iPhone ushered in an era of touchscreen gadgets that caused most buttons to vanish from our phones forever. But there was one brief moment in the gray, transitory haze between buttons and touchscreens that an unlikely company tried to fuse the two together. BlackBerry split the difference by boldly asking, “What if a touchscreen was also a hardware button?”
Read Article >Thus was born the BlackBerry Storm, a device whose entire touchscreen doubled as a pressable button. The Storm was one of the first (and last) attempts to bridge the legacy world of physical keyboards and the modern world of touchscreens. But to understand the existence of the BlackBerry Storm and its bizarre clicking screen, we first need to go back and understand BlackBerry at the height of its power — and why it wanted to keep buttons alive.
Feb 28, 2022
The Steam Controller’s troubled trackpads made for a better Steam Deck
PC or console? Mouse and keyboard, or controller? It’s a debate that’s raged for nearly as long as video games themselves. So in 2013, Valve — creator of games like Half-Life and Portal, and the founder of Steam, the beating heart of PC gaming — attempted to fuse the two camps together.
Read Article >The Steam Controller was originally introduced as part of Valve’s Steam Machine push. The initiative attempted to convince partners to build gaming PCs that would sit in a living room like an Xbox or a PlayStation, but run the massive library of PC games already available on Steam. Plenty of PC owners have hooked up their computer to their television, but the Steam Machine project had bigger ambitions to turn living room PC gaming into a platform.
Jan 28, 2022
The eject button held all the power on the original Xbox
The most important button on the original Xbox wasn’t the power button: it was the button to eject the disc tray.
Read Article >Conceptually, this doesn’t make sense. Of course the power button should be the most important button — it turns on (and off) the whole console. But that attitude is steeped in our understanding of modern devices, where our games and apps are far more self-contained than they were during the original Xbox’s heyday.
Dec 29, 2021
You must never press the original Razr’s forbidden internet button
The first phone I ever owned was a Motorola Razr. The Razr’s buttons are some of the finest ever to grace a mobile device. The keypad is laser-etched out of a sheet of shimmering aluminum, and when pressed, ignites in a lambent blue glow that looked like the sci-fi future.
Read Article >But there was one button that I was terrified to press. In all my years of owning a Razr, I can’t say I tapped it more than once or twice, and never on purpose: the internet button.
Nov 25, 2021
The snooze button is the best part of the world’s most hated gadget
Few gadgets are more hated than the alarm clock, a device whose primary purpose is to rudely rip you from the pleasant world of sleep into the cold, harsh, unforgiving reality that we live in every day — and whose level of functionality is directly proportional to how goddamn annoying the beeping sound it can make is.
Read Article >But within virtually all alarm clocks is also a crucial reprieve: the snooze button, a temporary salve for the alarm’s cruel clarion call, a stay of execution for the day you will inevitably have to face. It is the phrase “just a few more minutes” rendered in plastic.
Oct 22, 2021
It’s party time, smash the EXTRA BASS button
The button is simple, almost plain. A flat black circle, simple dye-sublimated letters, and a small LED pinprick to let you know that it’s on. “EXTRA BASS,” it declares in tall, bold capitals. For indeed, the EXTRA BASS button only does one blindingly obvious thing: it adds extra bass.
Read Article >The speaker in question here is a Sony XB90 Extra Bass High Power Audio System. It is a product without pretension, without guile or duplicity. It has Extra Bass in the name, and the eponymous button is a microcosm of the device, a thing that encapsulates the form and function in a neat, tidy shorthand.