The Palm Pre home button was the first to be the last
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/22555406/palm-pre-home-button-gestures-swiping
Reported today in The Verge.
The Palm Pre home button was the first to be the last
In today's digital age, it sometimes feels like hardware has taken a back seat to the software that drives our devices. Button of the Month is a monthly column that explores the physical pieces of our phones, tablets, and controllers that we interact with every day.
Physical home buttons are all but extinct on modern smartphones, and the Palm Pre ended them.
It's not hard to notice that smartphones have steadily shed their buttons throughout the years: keyboards, numpads, call and hang up buttons, directional navigation keys, and more have all fallen to the wayside in favor of more versatile touchscreens.
In 2007, the iPhone - with its then-revolutionary 3.5-inch multitouch display - helped to push that trend along by reducing navigation down to a single home button. But even as touchscreen sizes grew and buttons fell away, the humble home button stubbornly stuck around. (Apple wouldn't ditch the button for over a decade, when the iPhone X arrived in 2017.)
But it was the Palm Pre, and its largely unnecessary center button, that showed home buttons could be removed for good.
The original Pre, launched in 2009, may not have seemed like the harbinger of home button doom. After all, the Pre had a home button, at least for its first iteration. But crucially, the Pre's home button was effectively a vestigial organ - an appendix that evolution hadn't quite managed to weed out just yet.
Pressing the Pre's home button did exactly one thing: brought up webOS's "Card" app switcher, something that could also be accomplished with a swipe gesture. Everything else about the Pre's navigation was focused instead on the touch-sensitive area around the button. Gestures were used to return home