Why HTC One X having physical button?

[Micro-Dona]

as the title of the thread is saying what I wanted to discuss over here. I really loved this particular phone but I was hoping that they will provide software buttons as it was in ICS. Most of the legacy apps are having bar in order to display the menu button. Which will be below of the capacitive ones. They will be combined with screen space.

[RidD]

Legacy apps can be updated as time gets pass however buttons does not require power to the backlight as that of the LCD display and it will not need processing power in order to operate. As they are placing the buttons on the screen you will get inefficient LCD backlight for those buttons. It would simply waste your processing power on the rendering on the screen. Those buttons cannot be disabled and you are wasting LCD real-estate. It will give you non-standard screen aspect ratio just because LCD panels are going to be off on the shelf part and they are designed by adding an extra menu bar pixels to standard aspect ratio.

[TamaraAce]

Yes I do agree with you that one will be able to disable the Software buttons so that you can get more screen real estate. It will not sacrifice the screen real estate as there are no physical buttons. Also it will improve the battery life as it is displaying real estate for apps as well as full-time LCD menu bar.

[Bhadran]

You will be able to disable the buttons by using ICS API developer and also you can modify the button as per the requirement of yours. there are custom rom available in the market which will allow you to get search button at the button bar which is not possible with the physical buttons on the device. so I don’t think so there is any great benefit to have a physical button.

[DaminiAMD]

I am not sure about the mobile phone but tablet are simply replaced with the small dot so you are going to have bar on the device and you will also lose the screen space as well. Personally I like to have hardware buttons rather than that of software one. I don’t like menu bar at all but it is said for the legacy apps hence pressure should be put on the developer as they will need to update the apps with ICS. If you are going to have hardware button then it will give you more screen, correct aspect ratios and less power usage and after long time of usage menu button would become more redundant.

[Chaaruchandra]

Same as you I am also in the favor of physical button. But it should be placed at the bottom of the device and I don’t like to use touch screen buttons at all.

[HankH]

The developer of the android that is Google itself announced that they are looking to do something so that there will not be any physical buttons on the device. so now there are some phones which really need to be redesigned so that it can used by ICS. However phone which are having software button will not require to change the hardware at all. if I am not wrong there are enough amount of people who really wanted to deal with the hardware buttons so HTC has to do in favor of them as well. But by using software button the size of the device is getting reduced and that is the only reason why I prefer to use software button rather than that of hardware one.

[akkiiii]

I could not get why they are looking to abandon the menu button though it was perfect. There is no need of having multitask button where you will be able to get the same result after pressing the home button. I am wondering that the Android developer would work on the additional option into default ics so that people who are not using custom rom can deal with them. as far as menu bar of htc one X is concerned it is having an option to hide the same. it was done in the previous version but I am wondering that they have forgot to add into the final version.

[Memphis M]

Well I am really happy with the software button the HTC One X and I really don’t wanted to use software button at all.