I saw this news and my reaction was, "Of course it is, doing anything else would be stupid." But that on its own doesn't mean it could just be a phone app if the hardware adds something useful to the way the user interacts with it. For example, old Sony mirrorless cameras just ran Android under the hood but the specific hardware is what made those products, not the OS. As a hardware person, both the Rabbit R1 and the…
I think people do seem generally annoyed by the scroll wheel, but I think that's just a bad implementation in this case. I don't think that means that all physical controls (meaning: not a touch screen) are just pointless gimmicks. It's a bit myopic to think we've hit some perfect un-challengable UI paradigm with flickable scrolling and sheets of software buttons and fields that you tap.