Dimples are peel-and-stick buttons for your smartphone. They are NFC enabled so they need no batteries and actually communicate wirelessly with your smartphone. Their purpose is to add mechanical buttons to touch devices.
On a basic level the Dimples are pretty. They don't make a smartphone look gross, unless you plaster them all over it. They are also very simple. They're just 1 or 2 buttons that you assign to particular apps or windows. They're elegant in that respect
But their function is what makes them worthwhile. Dimples can be programmed to open apps, take a picture, or do any number of other things. This is great because in a world that is focused on limiting taps and effort it still takes a click of a home button and then the selecting of the app to take a picture. A Dimple could reduce that to one press. Dimples actually function as a physical shortcut button.
The folks that make Dimples realize that in the touch screen world, the device is a throwback. But that is kind of nice. While the use of a finger on a touchscreen may be more natural to learn, but the experience is offset by having a piece of glass between you and the "button/icon" you are pressing. Its like the difference in experience between an e-reader and book. Dimples help to make the digital world physically interactive, it adds texture and physical feedback to device use while at the same time reducing the effort of getting to certain apps.
Dimples also add a bit of customizability to a smartphone. Now people can tailor the hardware of their device a little, which has never been possible. This concept of physical add-ons that improve the device can be expanded in many different directions other than Dimples.
Overall, Dimples are a great idea that improves our modern glassy world by letting us add our own buttons where we want them.
