Some months ago I ordered this cheap physical button for my phone. It plugs into the audio port and gives you an additional button which you can program to open certain apps or run certain tasks.
The cheap button was just £1 but this, the “proper” Pressy button, is almost £20 when you add the shipping etc. Is it worth the extra cost?
Well, in my testing yes it is. When I got the cheaper alternative I struggled to download the 360 one-click software that’s needed in any other language than Chinese. Even when I did try and translate it using images and Google translate it kept playing all the audio through the 3.5mm audio port because it firmly believed that I had a set of headphones plugged in, not this additional button.
Now though the official Pressy button has arrived and the difference is like night and day. The setup is a simple and quick process, but you do need to check if your device is compatible and it only runs on Android. It arrives in a lovely cardboard box and there’s a QR code for you to scan which will get you started and basically tells the people at Pressy that you bought the device. It also comes with a little carrier, so when you do want to put your headphones in you simply pop it into the holster and carry it on your keys until you’re done with your headphones.
We went into further details in our hardware review but I must admit that’s an impressive little thing. You can set it to respond to one, two or three presses. So you can have one press for the torch, two presses for the casino app from Royal Vegas, Minecraft, Goat Simulator etc or three presses for the camera and so on. A lot of people tend to use this as a camera button, so one press could be to activate the camera, two presses for email and – in my case – three presses to get the Strava app running so I can go out for a ride quickly.
You can also get it to call someone, or send a predefined text message. You can also add your location, so this could perhaps be used if you want to quickly update someone if you’re travelling frequently. Just one press could do this..
There’s also the ability to start an audio recording (ideal if you do meetings regularly), play music or tweak any number of phone settings, such as muting the phone when you’re at work.
All in all, Pressy is definitely a more fully-featured app and the product itself seems better built and thought-out than the cheaper alternative. Plus it works on the G3, even though the compatibility list said it didn’t, which is a bonus.