Tapdo: The Button That Does Everything - Launching soon on Kickstarter

While the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona presented a large catalog of innovative and creative gadgets, none is as clever and as simple as Tapdo. Tapdo can do everything a phone can do: it can control music played on a Bluetooth or wireless device, it can call a cab, adjust lighting in your home, control temperature or simply control the movie you’re watching.

What’s so innovative in this, you ask? Well, Tapdo is a button. That’s it, a single button, reminiscent of Apple’s design of the home button on iDevices. So how can Tapdo do all these things?

Tapdo connects to your phone via Bluetooth and then scans your fingerprints. The button is able to scan the prints of different parts of your fingers, and can even detect the orientation of your print in order to assign different actions for every orientation.

In order to actually assign actions to the button, you need to download the official Tapdo companion app, connect your phone to your Tapdo gadget, then scan the part of your finger you want to assign an action to, and then choose the action you want to be assigned. Using the app is extremely intuitive, as is the initial setup, so it’s very unlikely that anyone will get a headache from setting their Tapdo up.

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So far, Tapdo has seen the light of day at Mobile World Congress 2017 and the Wearable Technology Show 2017, where the team behind the ambitious little gadget was present in order to convince people of the usefulness and simplicity that their project offers. If you really wanted to give it a try personally, you’ll be able to do so in Hannover, on March 20-24, at the CeBIT event.

One crucial detail about Tapdo is that you can’t buy it…yet. In fact, it doesn’t even have its own Kickstarter page yet. While the official website promises that a Kickstarter page will be up on March 28 and that the early-bird backers will get their Tapdo sets in September 2017, it remains to be seen whether the team can fulfill these promises. Supposedly, early-bird backers will receive their Tapdo devices along with a battery and a useful wristband for taking your Tapdo everywhere you go. This should also be the package everyone receives upon purchasing a Tapdo, but nothing is confirmed yet. If you are eager to get your hands on one, you can always subscribe to their newsletter in order to receive news and be the first to find out when the Kickstarter campaign will be released.

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Starting at $99 on its Kickstarter campaign, the price may be a bit too high for what you get, but one thing is clear: Tapdo is perhaps the most simple, yet innovative and versatile smart device designed in the last few years. It’s the kind of genius idea that makes people think “I could’ve come up with it too”, but then makes them realize that somebody did it first. Whether Tapdo is a commercial success or a failure, it certainly serves as an inspiration to wannabe inventors and shows us that simplicity can go a long way.