Are you kidding me? All of those functions are 10x easier to do on the "unfit touchscreen" that on what we had before that (tiny non-touch screens, LCDs, 80's style arrays of buttons, etc).
And when it comes to actually taking the picture, changing track or volume etc, smartphones even offer physical buttons on the sides.
Remember trying to get to the 10th track of the 4th folder in your "physical" CD mp3 player or minidisk? Setting anything more advanced than zoom level and picture mode on a typical 2002-2005 compact camera?
Side picture buttons are increasingly rare if not defunct, volume rockers are still here though.
A lot of things that could be done quickly is now fragile and subtle. A side effect of translating desktop UX to IRL handheld gadgets, by the promise that software will be smart enough to make it one button away.
psedit: as noted below, I indeed never realized the volume rocker was bound to snapshot. My rant is half void now u_u;
Thank you for the double-tap tip, though. It works in Marshmallow too, apparently.
I remember putting my music on MP3 players for the last 12 years, having non-MP3 CDs before that, and being able to perform basic operations on them blind and one-handed. I remember using my non-touch camera being much quicker to adjust than the app in my phone, especially when I'm adjusting the more advanced settings.
Touchscreens are optimized for flexibility and portability, and they're great at those. They're terrible at being fit for specific purposes.
You remember through rose colored glasses then.
Try using that non-touch early 00's compact camera again (and no cheating with DSLRs with dedicated aperture and speed dials). As for the "blind and one-handed" operation with the non-mp3 CDs, did that include changing through 200+ albums and 2000+ tracks?
I don't have a touch camera at all. The one that I do have isn't a DSLR, but includes various dials. That's my point: dedicated controls will always be better. A camera that primarily relies on a direction pad and menus is only slightly better than using a touchscreen (but it is better).
> As for the "blind and one-handed" operation with the non-mp3 CDs, did that include changing through 200+ albums and 2000+ tracks?
For the CDs? Of course not. I'm not going to claim that a single CD could hold that many, whether or not they were in MP3 format. As for the MP3 player, I tend to set playback to a particular artist or setting the player to randomly play song from the whole library (by sight, of course), then throw it in my pocket. From that point, basic playback control doesn't require me to take it out of my pocket, while I'd have to at least take out my phone and wake up the screen to start doing the same thing.
I've got to assume that the way we tend to use our devices differs enough that something that feels like a huge improvement to me is a piddling detail in your use-case. On the other hand, some of the ways that I liked using my devices have disappeared, or at least been de-emphasized in more recent models, and that's what I'm frustrated with.
The old Blackberry devices were UI marvels. The physical scroll wheel was great.
That said, Nokia did a few phys.kbd phones not long ago. Bought a C5 for my mom as she just wanted a simple thing. Unfortunately the software layer was one of the worst one I had to experience in my whole life. 4 random and generic submenus on average to get to any function. Ellipsis full menus ... gosh.
Anyway, shootout to Blackberry.