Matthew Panzarino on the iPhone 6s and 3D Touch

TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino has written my favorite iPhone 6s review yet. He goes into detail on performance and camera improvements, but he also focuses on the productivity aspect of 3D Touch and why iOS 7’s design helped bring the feature to life.

This is one of the big things that 3D Touch does, it eases the fear of handling actionable items. It allows you to retain your context while adding something to your calendar, peeking at an email or sneaking a look at a link to see if you really want to read it.

Pressing lightly to ‘peek’ and pushing hard to ‘pop’ it into existence provides an escape hatch that eases your mind, and a new iOS 9 affordance injects a ‘back’ button at the top left corner of any screen you jump to. iOS 9’s new task manager, accessed by a firm press on the edge of the screen (or the standard double-tap of the home button) is also arranged in a much more contextually rich card format — a time-line of your jumping around through apps.

It’s not hard to imagine how apps will take advantage of 3D Touch, and Matthew gets it.