I never owned an iPod. My portable music needs were satisfied by various other players, like an iRiver and a Zune HD. The latest was the one that also proved very useful when I begun developing games for the then up-and-coming Windows Phone platform. The Zune HD is an amazing MP3 player. The software was fast, fluid and intuitive (not to mention it looked absolutely gorgeous). I still use it a lot, and I am sad that it has been discontinued as a product. I always believed that Microsoft should follow the iPhone-iPod paradigm, that of having an extra product that acts like a media player, but is also able to run all the software Windows Phone can, without being a phone itself. That would catapult the platform, since developers would potentially have many more users. Oh, and I would buy one :)

Anyway, back to the feature of the title. While developing my first game for XNA, Tetrada, which essentially became my first game for Windows Phone, and then got pulled from the Marketplace, I discovered that the Zune HD hardware had a unique and amazing feature. While its (gorgeous) touch screen was capacitive (as in “reacted to touch and not pressure”) it also had variable pressure sensitivity (although I do suspect that it was implemented in an “touch area variable” way more than actual pressure sensing). So it would react like any Windows Phone, iPhone or Android phone today to touch, but if you pushed further on the screen, the hardware (and of course software) would register this push depending how strong you pushed. This little feature is amazing and gives many possibilities to game developers. For example, imagine being able to control a racing game’s accelerator or brake pedals by pushing harder. Or control the power of the shot in a football game.

This pressure sensitivity already appeared in this week’s Microsoft announcement of the Surface tablet’s keyboard, so I guess I can still hope!

I would love it if this feature returned to Windows Phones, it would make games on the platform stick out in yet another way.