Sometimes it feels like hardware is being replaced by the software that powers our digital devices in today's digital age. The Button of the month is a monthly column that examines the physical components of our smartphones, tablets, controllers, and other devices that we use every day.Modern smartphones have made physical home buttons virtually non-existent, with the exception of the Palm Pre.It is easy to see that smartphones have lost their buttons over the years. Keyboards, numpads and call and hangup buttons have all been replaced by more versatile touchscreens.The iPhone's revolutionary 3.5-inch multitouch screen helped push this trend forward. It also reduced navigation to one home button in 2007, The humble home button remained despite the proliferation of touchscreens and disappearance of buttons. The button remained in Apple's arsenal for more than a decade until the arrival of the iPhone X in 2017.It was the Palm Pre and its largely inconvenient center button that made it clear that home buttons could be eliminated.Although the original Pre was launched in 2009, it may not have appeared to be the end of the home button era. The Pre did have a home button at least in its initial iteration. The Pres home button was, in fact, a vestigil organ that evolution had not yet gotten rid of.This device is the first to demonstrate gesture-based navigation can workThe Pres home button was pressed to bring up webOSs Card app switchinger. This can also be done with a swipe gesture. The Pres navigation's touch-sensitive area was the focus of everything else. To return home, to go back to a screen, to pull up a dock with your favorite apps, and many other things, you could use gestures.The home button was merely a training tool for users who were already familiar with them on other touchscreen devices. It was not a part of the user experience that was essential.It's not surprising that the Pre 2 ditched the button completely a year later to use an illuminated LED strip to perform gestures. The familiar white pillbox design has been copied by both iOS and Android to allow multitasking gestures.There were issues with Palms implementation. Some gestures were not intuitive and users had to learn new concepts when they made the switch from a Palm device that was older. Modern smartphones have the advantage of having more control over touchscreen interfaces and more space to make gestures work.Although the Pre would eventually fail, it will remain in history as the device that had the most iconic home button and was the first to demonstrate gesture-based navigation can replace home buttons. If you look at any smartphone that was popular in 2021, it is clear that Palm was ahead of the rest in this regard.
