The Palm Pre residence button was the primary to be the final

Physical residence buttons are all however extinct on trendy smartphones, and the Palm Pre ended them.

It’s not exhausting 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 pattern alongside by lowering navigation all the way down to a single residence button. But at the same time as touchscreen sizes grew and buttons fell away, the standard residence button stubbornly caught round. (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 pointless middle button, that confirmed residence buttons could possibly be eliminated for good.

The authentic Pre, launched in 2009, might not have appeared just like the harbinger of residence button doom. After all, the Pre had a house button, at the very least for its first iteration. But crucially, the Pre’s residence button was successfully a vestigial organ — an appendix that evolution hadn’t fairly managed to weed out simply but.

Pressing the Pre’s residence button did precisely one factor: introduced up webOS’s “Card” app switcher, one thing that is also completed with a swipe gesture. Everything else in regards to the Pre’s navigation was targeted as a substitute on the touch-sensitive space across the button. Gestures have been used to return residence, return a display screen, pull up a dock of favourite apps, and extra.

The residence button itself served extra as coaching wheels for customers used to seeing one on different touchscreen gadgets, moderately than a mandatory a part of the consumer expertise, one which was wholly optionally available to the precise perform of the gadget.

It’s no marvel that only a yr later the Pre 2 would go on to skip the almost ineffective button solely in favor of an illuminated LED strip for gestures. That familiar-looking white pillbox has been aped by the fashionable iterations of each iOS and Android for multitasking gestures.

There have been, in fact, points with Palm’s implementation: among the gestures have been unintuitive, and for customers making the leap from a extra conventional Palm gadget, there have been quite a lot of new ideas that needed to be discovered from scratch. Conversely, extra trendy smartphones profit from the benefit of customers who’re much more aware of touchscreen interfaces, together with much more actual property to make these gestures work.

But whereas the Pre would finally fail, it nonetheless stands out in historical past as arguably the gadget with the last word residence button within the historical past of smartphones — and because the first gadget to show that gesture-based navigation may really achieve changing residence buttons. And having a look at any widespread smartphone in 2021, it’s clear that at the very least in that regard, Palm was approach forward of the competitors.