I have mixed feelings about the software buttons

---

android phones are prone to hangs due to incompatible and poorly managed apps, i have custom roms installed, all optimized and stuff but occasionally i still need to restart my phone using the three button combo because my phone wont respond at all, the home button is a physical button that is sure to send a signal to the underlying hardware which is very useful for overriding stuff, in the event of hangs, how does the gnex deal with it? the power and down button is already reserved for screenshot..sigh..guess be prepared to take out the battery then..

another thing is, the home button is a quick go to action for exiting no matter what you're doing and its location is fixed, with a software home button, it changes location and even hides, not very intuitive..

if they really have wanted a maximum real estate, why didnt they just put the home button at the top or the side but maintain it as a hardware button

i guess well just have to see from reviews when the gnex comes out, after all honeycomb tablets have no physical home buttons anyway

Maybe they use the same thing as on the sgs II. Long press of the power button and it reboots.

And I like the fact that it doesn't have hardware buttons (except volume and power) because of two things:

1. Clean front (looks great).
2. Hardware buttons could brake.

Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App

Keep in mind that apps run in a java virtual machine but the buttons will probably run in the OS itself. Meaning home will still be an override.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S3 using XDA Ultimate App

Originally Posted by LordButtersI

Keep in mind that apps run in a java virtual machine but the buttons will probably run in the OS itself. Meaning home will still be an override.

but that is the problem

how would "home" button work, if the screen is hung, and the buttons are not responding, when say you were in a game or playing a video, and it hung, then you have no access to the "home" button

that's why i prefer a real button or at the very least the capacitive buttons, than a software button

Remember that when it comes down to it, hardware buttons on the front interface with the phone's software too. If the screen is hanging, the hardware buttons won't work any better than a row of software buttons would.

Originally Posted by martonikaj

Remember that when it comes down to it, hardware buttons on the front interface with the phone's software too. If the screen is hanging, the hardware buttons won't work any better than a row of software buttons would.

i had many many cases where the app/game whatever hung, but the hard button or capacitive buttons were still responding

so i was able to summon Taks Manager to kill the hung app, that would not let me switch to other apps

so in this scenario when you have no buttons to press, you wont be able to invoke the Task Manager to kill the hung app

Originally Posted by AllGamer

i had many many cases where the app/game whatever hung, but the hard button or capacitive buttons were still responding

so i was able to summon Taks Manager to kill the hung app, that would not let me switch to other apps

so in this scenario when you have no buttons to press, you wont be able to invoke the Task Manager to kill the hung app

I guess what the other posts are trying to say is this:

Even if a specific app may freeze completely, the software buttons should still work. Crashing apps normally don't freeze the whole OS because they're running in a Java Virtual Machine, but since they're often fullscreen, you need to press the HOME to exit the app. This should still work with the software buttons (as long as they're visible in the app) because they're running outside the frozen Virtual Machine.

I have an ASUS Eee Pad Transformer since its release. It runs Honeycomb and comes without hardware buttons as well. But the Transformer never got totally unresponsive, some apps froze, but the software buttons still worked perfectly normal.


edit: the post below this one is actually a better explanation than this, read it and you'll get it

Originally Posted by AllGamer

i had many many cases where the app/game whatever hung, but the hard button or capacitive buttons were still responding

so i was able to summon Taks Manager to kill the hung app, that would not let me switch to other apps

so in this scenario when you have no buttons to press, you wont be able to invoke the Task Manager to kill the hung app

Touchscreen presses are captured by the OS and then passed onto app event handlers. With past Android versions, when an app hang, the OS is still responding to and dispatching touchscreen events, but because the app in the foreground handling the events isn't doing anything, it looks like the system is not responding to touchscreen events.

With ICS, the OS has handlers for touchscreen events, not just apps, due to the software buttons. The OS makes sure that if the system bar is hidden, any sort of interaction with the system, including touchscreen events, bring up the system bar. Thus if the foreground app hangs, touching the screen should still bring up the system bar and let you press one of the three keys.

if that works as designed, then it should be safe to have software button

My phone only has power and volume hardware keys, then 4 captive touch. People keep freaking out about this but it's not all that different. The captive touch are sensors but they only react with the OS (and sometimes freeze up).

They are looking at it from the point of view that most phones are using captive touch buttons, which is very similar tech to the rest of the screen so they just made it a little adaptable. Now you can theme all your buttons (minus power and volume).

I don't know, I am probably being naive, but I see little difference between on screen and captive buttons. I have been just fine with the later so I see no issues and only new possibilities.