Red Pop Gives Your iPhone The Camera Button Its Always Needed

I’m all for the abandonment of most physical buttons on phones. Really — screw’em all. Except for the camera button.

We’ve all been there: you go to take that once-in-a-lifetime shot, only to fire the shutter a second too late because your big ol’ meat digits couldn’t find your iPhone’s stupid on-screen button in time. And yet, generation-after-generation, the iPhone fails to gain a camera button.

The Red Pop is an (almost funded!) Kickstarter project that aims to end your button deficit woes by… adding a big ol’ red camera shutter button to the iPhone.

Once you’ve acquired a Red Pop, you twist the bottom of the faux-barrel to uncover the dock connector. Plop the now unsheathed dongle into your iPhone’s dock port, and it’ll automatically launch the accessory’s accompanying iPhone app. From there, each press of the big red button will snap another photo — all without requiring you to hunt down that impalpable camera button as it hides in a flush forest of glass.

Of course, this solution has its.. drawbacks (especially when compared to a dedicated, on-device camera button). It bulks up your phone a bit, which makes it unlikely that you’ll be walkin’ around with the Red Pop/iPhone combo crammed into your pockets — and if you don’t have it on you (and on your phone) when that need-a-photo-now occasion arrises, it doesn’t really do you much good. It’s more along the lines of something you’d bring along on a photo walk.

Does this sound like something you’d be into? You can find the Red Pop Kickstarter page right over here.