Ultra-compact Canon SD3500 IS Eschews Buttons for Touchscreen

Today may mark another landmark in the evolution of electronics, the death of the button. While it may be premature to pronounce buttons dead, the iPhone and now the Canon SD3500 IS have all but removed all buttons from their devices. Canon's latest camera doesn't support multi-touch, but it does have gesture support, similar to the one found on Samsung DualView. The menu system is completely touch driven and intuitive functions like picture playback are easily controlled with finger movements. Defined gestures allow you to move from menu to menu with ease. The design is so unusual that it's looks wrong somehow. While the front of the Canon looks like most of their current sub-compacts, the back is all LCD. 3.5 inches of touchscreen and that is all there is to the back. There are still a few buttons on the top but the back is void of features.

Turning the camera on reveals menus and controls galore but we have to wonder whether holding the camera by the touchscreen will cause problems. Canon also adds a new aspect of face detection with the Wink Self Timer. Once in the shot and situated the photographer, now the subject, winks at the camera and the camera detects this facial expression and snaps the photo 2 seconds later. It can also be set to wait for a new face to enter a group and capture the image then. Up to 35 faces can be tracked at once in up to a 24mm wide angle shot, making for a much simpler group photo experience. Canon also improves support for the popular Eye-fi SD cards that helps transfer photos wirelessly once in range of your home network. The polished SD3500 IS sub-compact should hit the streets this month for around $330.