SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls:
Honda has done what no other car maker is doing, and returned to analogue controls for some functions on the new Honda Jazz.
While most manufacturers are moving to touchscreen controls, identifying smartphone use as their inspiration - most recently seen in Audi's latest A3 - Honda has decided to reintroduce heating and air conditioning controls via a dial rather than touchscreen, as in the previous-generation Jazz.
Jazz project leader Takeki Tanaka explained: "The reason is quite simple - we wanted to minimise driver disruption for operation, in particular, for the heater and air conditioning.
<no-sarcasm>
It seems to me that neither physical controls nor voice controlled operation are fundamentally incompatible with cars being both smart and connected.
</no-sarcasm>
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:35PM
20 years ago, I had electronics gear that was controlled via knobs and buttons. If you needed to do anything like that, you could scroll with knobs and go forward and backwards with the buttons. No touch screen required.
In terms of the car, it works great as you can have buttons and knobs for anything that you're going to do while driving and everything else can potentially be behind a navigation system.
This is just change for the sake of change. There hasn't been any positive changes to UI since sometime in the '90s. And yes, I mean '90s, Apple has been one of the worst offenders in this category. They are so focused on removing excess buttons and making the interface dumb, that each release seems to be less usable than the previous one.