Force Touch on iPhone 6s to Make iPhone Interactions Faster With Focus on 'Shortcuts'
Rumors have all but confirmed the upcoming iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus will include Force Touch, allowing the device to distinguish between a light tap and a deeper press to enable a wide range of new gestures.
Force Touch has been built into the Apple Watch and the trackpads of the Retina MacBook and the newest Retina MacBook Pros, adding a whole new dimension to the way the devices are controlled. On the Apple Watch, Force Touch is used within apps to access different settings, and on the Mac, it can do things like previewing links in Safari, and accelerating rewind/fast forward speed in iMovie.
Force Touch on the iPhone will work similarly to the way that it works on the existing devices that offer Force Touch, but there are some differences, according to information an inside source shared with 9to5Mac. Force Touch on the iPhone is said to be used primarily for "shortcut actions," letting users perform tasks within apps more quickly.
In Maps, for example, using Force Touch on a point of interest will cause turn-by-turn directions to start up immediately, while force pressing on a song in the Music app will bring up a menu to save it to a playlist. Force pressing on certain apps on the Home Screen could open directly to specific sections of the app.
Another feature in testing, according to one source, are shortcuts that appear after Force Touching an app icon on the Home screen. For example, if a user deep presses on the Phone app icon, he could choose to shortcut directly to the Voicemail tab. This could also apply to deep pressing the News app icon and being taken directly to either the Favorites or For You tabs.
Aside from Force Touch, the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus will feature an A9 processor with 2GB of RAM, a revamped camera system with a 12-megapixel camera, improved Touch ID, and a chassis made of a new material with reinforcements at the weak points that previously caused some iPhones to bend. Rumors suggest the addition of Force Touch and the new reinforcements will cause the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus to be 0.2mm thicker, a change that will be hardly noticeable to most users.
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