Pressy is a $17 button that controls your phone through the headphone jack

Physical buttons on smartphone seem to be an endangered species. But sometimes it’s easier to control your phone with the press of a button than an on-screen gesture.

Enter Pressy. The developers are raising funds on Kickstarter in the hopes of bringing a customizable, physical button to Android smartphones.

It’s a little device that you connect to your phone simply plugging it into your headphone jack. Once it’s in place, you can configure Pressy to perform all sorts of different functions through a series of clicks.

For instance you can click Pressy once to turn on your phone’s LED light and use it as a flashlight. Use a long-click to toggle silent mode. Or double-click to take a picture with your phone’s camera.

Those are just the out-of-the-box clicks that come with Pressy. You can install the Pressy app on your phone to setup other actions such as voice recording, performing a social network check-in, closing all running apps, or making a phone call.

Pressy works kind of the same way as the volume buttons or track skip buttons you may find on some headsets. It can send a little info to your phone through the headphone jack. But with the Pressy app running on your Android device, instead of skipping tracks you can send SMS messages, shoot videos, or perform other actions.

When you want to use your headphone jack to actually plug in headphones, you can use the buttons on your headset to control Pressy actions.

The Pressy team has working prototypes, but took to Kickstarter to raise funds for mass production. The project has already exceeded its $40,000 fundraising goal, so it seems likely that the team will have enough money to move from the prototype stage to the product stage. But the first units aren’t expected to ship until March, 2014.

The developers are promising to send backers a Pressy button for a pledge of $17 or more.

Right now this is an Android-only product, although the developer say they could consider offering a version for jailbroken iPhones in the future.

via Droid Life