Bodily house buttons are all however extinct on trendy smartphones, and the Palm Pre ended them.
It’s not onerous to note that smartphones have steadily shed their buttons all through the years: keyboards, numpads, name and dangle up buttons, directional navigation keys, and extra have all fallen to the wayside in favor of extra versatile touchscreens.
In 2007, the iPhone — with its then-revolutionary 3.5-inch multitouch show — helped to push that development alongside by lowering navigation all the way down to a single house button. However at the same time as touchscreen sizes grew and buttons fell away, the common-or-garden house button stubbornly caught round. (Apple wouldn’t ditch the button for over a decade, when the iPhone X arrived in 2017.)
Nevertheless it was the Palm Pre, and its largely pointless middle button, that confirmed house buttons might be eliminated for good.
The unique Pre, launched in 2009, might not have appeared just like the harbinger of house button doom. In any case, the Pre had a house button, not less than for its first iteration. However crucially, the Pre’s house button was successfully a vestigial organ — an appendix that evolution hadn’t fairly managed to weed out simply but.
The primary gadget to show that gesture-based navigation may work
Urgent the Pre’s house button did precisely one factor: introduced up webOS’s “Card” app switcher, one thing that may be achieved with a swipe gesture. Every part else in regards to the Pre’s navigation was centered as a substitute on the touch-sensitive space across the button. Gestures had been used to return house, return a display screen, pull up a dock of favourite apps, and extra.
The house button itself served extra as coaching wheels for customers used to seeing one on different touchscreen units, fairly than a essential a part of the consumer expertise, one which was wholly elective to the precise operate of the gadget.
It’s no surprise that only a yr later the Pre 2 would go on to skip the almost ineffective button fully in favor of an illuminated LED strip for gestures. That familiar-looking white pillbox has been aped by the trendy iterations of each iOS and Android for multitasking gestures.
There have been, after all, points with Palm’s implementation: a number of the gestures had been unintuitive, and for customers making the soar from a extra conventional Palm gadget, there have been plenty of new ideas that needed to be realized from scratch. Conversely, extra trendy smartphones profit from the benefit of customers who’re much more acquainted with touchscreen interfaces, together with much more actual property to make these gestures work.
However whereas the Pre would in the end fail, it nonetheless stands out in historical past as arguably the gadget with the last word house button within the historical past of smartphones — and because the first gadget to show that gesture-based navigation may truly achieve changing house buttons. And looking at any widespread smartphone in 2021, it’s clear that not less than in that regard, Palm was approach forward of the competitors.