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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

I'd love if my cellphone had a lateral button like old portable radios had to adjust the volume but with the sole purpose of scrolling. Scrolling on the screen is annoying, my finger covers the content and I must be careful not to click something. I really can't believe I'm the only one desiring such a thing.

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you're welcome: https://www.gsmarena.com/flashback_sony_ericsson_p910-news-5...

lateral scroll wheel. awesome phone:

https://fdn.gsmarena.com/imgroot/news/21/08/sony-ericsson-p9...

Oh man, these looked so awesome. I miss these phones sometimes. There was something cool about seeing what features different phones had. Nowadays, it's basically iOS vs Android, where both OSes do pretty much the same things, and it's all about the apps.

Sony had these on their Clié (Palm OS) devices as well.

I’ve only ever had first-party Palm handhelds, but the scroll wheel (Sony had some nifty name which is eluding me) always seemed very appealing for single-handed use.

Had a Palm III then a Clié back then. The Jog Dial was absolutely awesome.

Then got a LifeDrive, missed every bit of the Jog Dial. Probably the most iPhone-esque thing before the iPhone was a thing though.

>Sony had some nifty name which is eluding me

Jog Dial

I had a SonyEricsson P800 (the first of that series) and it had the same wheel, but IIRC was plastic made (just like the rest of the phone). Oh man I was barely 20yo back then and I feel bad for the hype I had while waiting the phone to actually come out and buy it. I also remember I paid an insane amount of money for it, which then became standard a few years later thanks to Apple.

sorry nerd, no t9 = no buy, how am I supposed to text under the desk at school without t9???

The Blackberry 7100t had a side scroll/job wheel like this along with a body narrower than other blackberries thanks to its 20 key qwerty-ish keyboard (2 characters per key). It still ranks as one of my favorite mobile devices. Great ergonomics paired with just enough web browsing capability to be helpful during emergencies; I would spend my morning Metro ride touch typing email drafts on it. It had its flaws of course, but the side jog wheel and narrow physical keyboard added up a “spark” of feeling like it was on to something.

Non sequitur: Another long forgotten device that still bounces into my thoughts every so often is the Psion REVO. 8MB RAM, 36MHz ARM processor, and full QWERTY keyboard that fit into your (back) pocket —- better paper specs than the hand-me-down 386sx I was using a few years before! One of these days I’ll dig though storage and see if I can resurrect it.

I always wondered if one could repurpose side-mounted fingerprint sensors (ex. Samsung Galaxy Fold) as a swipe-to-scroll mechanism.

There also used to be some lovely touchpad tech called "chiral scroll", which allowed for iPod-like scrolling. No idea where that went, patent hell?

> I always wondered if one could repurpose side-mounted fingerprint sensors (ex. Samsung Galaxy Fold) as a swipe-to-scroll mechanism.

Given how fp sensors are capacitive, this should totally be doable. Several phones (including my pixel 5) allow using rear fp sensors for opening/closing the notification shade.

> "chiral scroll"

Aah.. I miss that on my framework laptop. I had it on my old HP ProBook in the Synaptics settings. Chiral and (1 finger) edge scrolling were amazing. I'd suggest using ZMK/QMK and a touchpad from mouser if anyone wants to DIY one today.

My last Samsung with a back-mounted fingerprint sensor (A40) could do that (there was an option in the settings to enable scrolling with the fingerprint sensor).

An old phone if mine (not sure, but I think from OnePlus) supported gestures in the fingerprint sensor (back mounted in this case)

I'd love something like that. But I would want that to have tactice clicks, like mouse scrolling wheels, so that it can also be used for paging in book readers.

Which speaking of, there is a niche there for a product that I think is actually realistically doable at small scale. On Android, most book readers can be configured to flip pages with volume up/down, which is extremely convenient for one-handed reading. No such luck on iOS, though, where those buttons cannot be taken over by apps. It would be nice to have some kind of case for iPhones that incorporated dedicated page up/down buttons along those lines, just connecting to the actual phone via Bluetooth and presenting itself as a keyboard.

Afaik TikTok and the Kindle app both respondto media back/next keys, which is how the TikTok Bluetooth remotes work.

I would assume it'd also work with literal Page Up/Down keys, however that is exposed for keyboards when using Bluetooth. The important part is having that on the phone itself, placed such that when you hold it with one hand, the thumb is conveniently placed on the page down key, so that one only needs to push slightly to flip to the next page. That's what makes Android phones so convenient for reading over long periods of time compared to iPhones, where you have to lift the thumb and tap the screen for every page.

A touch sensitive side would be great for thumb scrolling.

With software detection of coherent scroll sliding, filtering out grip holds, bumps, and other irrelevant activity.

But noooo! Apple stuck a touch sensitive screen on a keyboard! No justice.

My samsung phone has the fingerprint scanner in the side power button (the only location that makes sense, IMHO). Software should be able to read gestures from this same sensor, no?

edit: Sorry, thinking out loud. A quick Google search confirms that my phone already has this feature in settings. Unfortunately, the gesture is mapped to showing/hiding the notification panel, instead of screen scrolling.

All the OG blackberries had this, are they that long ago that their forgotten? It was how you played brick breaker.

Another cool example is Nexus One's trackball. It had advantage of being able to scroll in any direction.

You could make a device like the doom scroller that would look like a roll on deodorant stick.

Some old (pre-smart, pre-camera, chunky ones with small B&W LCD screens) cell phones had a side scrollwheel that was used for menu navigation. I think it was clickable too.

The only more modern take on that that I know of was Marshall's "audiophile" Android phone [0] from 2015, which had a side scrollwheel for volume, but not sure if it was used for navigation.

0: https://m.gsmarena.com/marshalls_new_smartphone_is_every_aud...

My first cellphone (Sony) had this. I think it was https://images.app.goo.gl/Xc1RtzQSurxcFktt7 I even wonder if there wasn't haptic feedback. It was so cool at the time and I still miss it.

Hm, I remember portable MP3 players with those. The wheel broke fairly easily. Maybe they used cheap wheels in those, and there are higher end wheels.

The dials on all the "medium-end" digital cameras I've owned always worked reliably despite many years of regular use, as do mouse scroll wheels, so I gather you're correct about cheap components.

Come to think of it, the scroll wheel on my Logitech G502 — three-way clickable, switchable between free-scrolling and traditional mode — would work well in sort of handheld hardware scrolling device, and an electromagnetic scroll wheel of the sort used on some newer Logitech mice would work even better, as it could be configured in a free-scrolling mode with variable friction.

Reminds me of when I jailbroke an old iPhone and the only thing I really actually used the jailbreak for was making a long press on the volume buttons a previous / next song button. I actually really miss it.

I love the dial on apple watches for this reason.

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