Holy crap wait what? Not highlighted in any of the diagrams but visible in the teardown graphic, there's an extra pair of buttons on the back in ring-finger position too. They said 16 buttons, so it's two front touchpad/buttons, 1 front screen/button, 3 nav-buttons (the bars along the bottom) 4 face-buttons (a/b/x/y) 4 shoulder-buttons and 2 hidden back-side buttons.
16 "buttons" is what we have on current gen console controllers. The 360 has four shoulder buttons, A, B, X, Y, D-pad, start, select and click functionality on both analogue sticks. Some games (GTA V) come close to using all of them.
Yeah. In the typical twin-stick usage, this thing is missing one button on each side - it's got an extra shoulder button on each side (the ones on the back) but in the place of the 4 right face buttons and the left D-pad it's got 2 face buttons on each side.
Realistically, the other 4 buttons (the 3 bars on the bottom and the touch-screen) don't map to normal gameplay buttons, whereas a Sony/XBox gamepad will only have two of those "non-gameplay" buttons.
So technically, this thing has 2 fewer "gameplay buttons" than a typical controller. But it has a touchscreen, and you can put a lot of the low-reflexes stuff in there.
Holy crap wait what? Not highlighted in any of the diagrams but visible in the teardown graphic, there's an extra pair of buttons on the back in ring-finger position too. They said 16 buttons, so it's two front touchpad/buttons, 1 front screen/button, 3 nav-buttons (the bars along the bottom) 4 face-buttons (a/b/x/y) 4 shoulder-buttons and 2 hidden back-side buttons.