Marshall’s joystick button is a great way to control wireless headphones
In today’s digital age, it sometimes feels like hardware has taken a back seat to the software that drives out devices. Button of the Month is a monthly look at what some of those buttons and switches are like on devices old and new, and it aims to appreciate how we interact with our devices on a physical, tactile level.
There are many solutions for controlling music on a phone with your headphones. Conventional wisdom has long produced in-line remotes, traditionally on the right wire of the headphones, to provide some sort of control — be that a single button for toggling play / pause or a more advanced three-button setup that adds volume control and even a microphone. Apple once tried to make an iPod Shuffle entirely based on headphone controls, but it gave up on that pretty quickly.
But what do we do now that our headphones don’t have wires anymore? You can add complicated button arrays or dials, but those are hard to use when you can’t see them (like, say, the ring of buttons on the KitSound Arena). You can add touch controls, leaving users at the mercy of missed swipes and accidental taps. (I regularly accidentally dial friends because B&O Play decided that a “double tap to redial your last called number” function was a good idea.)
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