Xiaomi is one of the few companies that started their journey with outright stealing of ideas and were able to rise on this, finding incredible popularity. At some point, they even began to call it Chinese Apple – so much the corporate identity of the brand was similar to its American counterpart. But, what is especially surprising, the nickname that stuck to Xiaomi did not have a negative connotation, but sounded like praise. Apparently, this is why the Chinese still do not hesitate to copy ideas Apple.
Smartphones Xiaomi can be controlled by touching the back cover
Xiaomi is working on introducing a special add-on in MIUI 12, which will allow you to control compatible smartphones by touching the back cover. The innovation has already appeared in the test version of the firmware as an independent menu item, which indicates its readiness for the upcoming release. Despite this, at the moment to enable the function, which is simply called Back Tap in English localization, it was not possible to make it work on Redmi Note 7.
What is Back Tap
Back Tap will make it easier to manage smartphones
The way Back Tap works is pretty simple. A special menu will appear in the firmware settings where you can bind certain touches to certain actions. For example, make the smartphone launch the camera on a double tap or take a screenshot – on a triple tap. Not to say that the innovation is especially valuable, however, if it can even slightly simplify the use MIUI, it will already be great, because many users lack such simple commands.
With regard to compatibility with Back Tap, this question remains open. Xiaomi does not disclose any information on this matter, preferring to pray. However, given the obvious readiness of the innovation, which is already available as an independent menu item, it is likely that not all devices will be able to work with it. Basically, I would not be surprised if I found out that Xiaomi decided to limit Back Tap support only to flagship devices, as did the same Apple. Speaking of Apple …
How Back Tap works
Few people know that the idea to teach smartphones to recognize touches on the back belongs not to Xiaomi, but to Apple. Last month, the American company introduced iOS 14, one of the innovations of which was a function with exactly the same purpose and completely identical name. How exactly the developers Apple managed to force smartphones to interpret tapping on the lid is unclear, but for some reason only the newest models received this ability.
Back Tap originally appeared in iOS 14
The details about how Back Tap works are still a secret, but I have a version that is quite adequate, in my opinion. It seems to me that this function relies entirely on the base of the gyroscope and accelerometer, which senses short-term shaking of the case, provoked by touch, and interprets them into commands. In any case, I cannot explain the work of Back Tap in any other way, because there is no touch panel on the covers of smartphones Apple or Xiaomi. This means that recognition is precisely what is mechanical.
Is Back Tap necessary in practice? On the one hand, it is indisputably needed. Still, the creation of the same screenshots now requires too many actions for such a primitive result. And the ability to just touch the back cover of the smartphone will solve this problem, because now a screenshot can be taken with one hand without using the other. But, on the other hand, the risk of accidental activations during use is not excluded, when touching the lid or shifting smartphones from hand to hand can be interpreted as a command.