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The iPhone now has a back button, sort of

Thomas Wellburn
May 29, 2015

Startup company Halo Back has launched a Kickstarter campaign for their new iPhone ‘Smart’ screen protector, which guards your phone while also adding a back button.

If you’re an Android user coming to iPhone for the first time, there’s one thing you’ll immediately miss when navigating the UI: a back button. Without a physical key on the phone body itself, you have to resort to the ones built into the applications themselves. This isn’t exactly ideal, as they tend to sit right in the top left corner and mock your tiny hands and short fingers.

Kickstarter project Halo Back is aiming to change this with what they are billing as the ‘world’s first smart screen protector’. While it may look like a simple piece of adhesive to protect your screen from scratches or bumps, it’s actually a little more radical than that.

Requiring no batteries, no bluetooth and no proprietary apps, it uses a smart layer that harnesses your own conductive energy and directs it to the top left portion of the screen, where the back button usually appears. It’s a simple idea that works pretty ingeniously, so long as the back button remains in the top left.

Being that it’s just a piece of conductive cabling, the price is also impressive too. At just $17, this converts to only £11 in the UK. For that price, it makes little sense to pass it up. The backers have already destroyed their funding goal of $20,000, hitting $150,000 with only 14 days to go.

For more on Apple, visit What Mobile’s dedicated Apple page.

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