One of the biggest surprises at Apple’s Glowtime event was a new feature across the iPhone 16 series: Camera Control, a new physical button on the side of the phones with extra camera features and AI capabilities. This is novel for an iPhone, to be sure. But it owes a lot to the Sony Xperia series and other phones that have had dedicated camera shutter buttons for years.
The Xperia 1 and Xperia 5 phones weren’t the most advanced designs on the market, as they notably retained a full top bezel to hide their selfie camera rather than going with notches. But they were committed to more robust camera features, most meaningfully giving seasoned photographers the familiarity of a button on the bottom of the right side of the phones — which, when rotated horizontally, sits right under where the right pointer finger would expect the same button to be on a conventional camera.
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The Xperia phones have never sold well enough to compete with Apple’s iPhones, but their considerations for mobile photographers were laudable and earned them a small but loyal following.
Apple doesn’t share Sony’s design motivation — the iPhone 16’s button is heavily tied to AI. Users can press it to have the company’s new Visual Intelligence feature explain whatever is in front of the phone’s camera, which seems to work similar to the Google Lens app.
But if Apple wants to get iPhone 16 owners to use its AI features, creating a discrete button that also has other camera controls is a way to do it. Conceivably, getting iPhone owners used to running their pointer finger across the Camera Control button’s capacitive surface in order to zoom in and zoom out keeps it firmly in mind.
Still, the ability to use the Camera Control button as a settings toggle to tweak the zoom or, as Apple showed off during the Glowtime event, change the aperture to switch up depth of field, is a win for mobile photographers. Better still, third-party apps can use Camera Control too, such as using it to switch between different group chats in Snap to send your temporary photo, as Apple demonstrated during the event.
We’ll have to wait for our hands-on tests to see how useful Camera Control is for switching up camera settings mid-shoot or if third parties integrate its functionality into their apps. But it’s a design decision away from the sleek, capacitive-only buttons future rumored by Economic Daily News and toward more physical buttons that make iPhones more customizable and, arguably, fun to use.
The future we live in with the iPhone 16 owes much to the past of the Xperia phones and their shutter buttons that aimed to be more familiar for traditional photographers — blending convention with technology to put more camera capability in your pocket.
Watch this: Apple’s iPhone 16 Gets Camera Control Button
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