It's all but confirmed at this point that Apple's next iPhone (likely called the 6S) will have a new feature called Force Touch.
It's a feature very well-known to Apple Watch owners. The idea is a pressure-sensitive screen that does different stuff when you push harder.
It's hard to imagine the Apple Watch without this feature. There's so little real estate to go around on a watch screen that navigating inside applications becomes difficult without another way to input into the device. That's what's so great about it, another layer of input to help you get around easier.
One of the most annoying things about iOS on iPhone is tapping and tapping and tapping. It seems like there are endless menus to go through by selecting categories, then sub categories, then further sub categories. Force Touch may very well solve this problem and make the iPhone a ton easier to use.
Here's a sample of how it works on the Apple Watch:
Let's say you're in the middle of a workout, and your watch will look like this:
After you use Force Touch you get a couple of useful options you can do while in the workout to make your life much easier:
Same with the weather app:
After a Force Touch:
Helpful, right?
Now let's think about how this could possibly apply to the iPhone. Of course, the possibilities are endless. Once third party developers get their hands on the new phone with this technology I'm sure they will come up with all sorts of awesome ways to use it.
But if we might project a possibility here, what if it were used to get around the annoying series of clicks in, say, Google Maps.
When you want to get directions somewhere you have to go through what I think is a tiresome series of taps to get to the actual directions in through four screens that need to be tapped and fetched through the the internet:
Now, imagine how Force Touch could help here. In theory you might eventually be able to search for a location, and once you find it, just Force Touch and it will take you right to turn-by-turn directions. Voila!
Of course, this is all just hypothetical, but it's certainly something the new feature could do and it's easy to see how well it could work throughout the iOS ecosystem.
It's a telling example of the kinds of possibilities Apple is opening up with this new hardware and why it's the one new feature everyone should be excited about.
