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Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

For me, removing the Home button would turn an automatic upgrade into a wait-and-see. I've had too many bad experiences with capacitive buttons on everything from smartphones to laptops to keyboards.

Not to mention the inherent problem of a capacitive button that lives on a bezel that people use to grasp the device. There'd be no grazing the home button while turning or moving your hand positions without possibly-activating that button. Absent some bullet-proof pressure-sensing technology, it would be incredibly frustrating.

So mark me down for hoping that the "touch" bit is either an allusion to some haptic feedback technology, or some pressure-sensing technology, or even just an ad-copy play off "see" that people are reading too much into.

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The iPad presents a unique problem though: you can use the iPad in any orientation. For example, when using it in landscape mode, the home button can be on either the far left or right: it's a huge moving target, and with a screen the size of an iPad, it's often outside your peripheral vision (unlike the iPhone).

What if the home button moves depending on screen orientation? i.e. the home button is always at the center of the bottom-most bezel edge? It's not a particularly usable solution without the best capacitive button ever made, but it's interesting to think about.

In all likelihood, multitasking is probably a 'swipe up' gesture from the bottom of the screen now, similar to what Apple is doing with the trackpad in Mountain Lion's notification system.

I'm imagining a WebOS-style gesture, but the swipe action is from the screen edge, not the bezel.

</speculation>

I agree, though. Capacitive buttons are awful, especially on an iPad where there's so much room for an accidental press.

iPad already does that (off by default): four-finger swipe up shows the list of apps, and four-finger swipe left or right takes you to other apps.

Edit: and I think four-finger pinch takes you back to the home screen. The only real use for the Home button on an iPad now is for taking screenshots (remapping double-click the Power button could probably replace this)

Trouble with the pinch gesture is the iPhone. The gesture is impossible to use with one hand, and even with two hands, it's still rather awkward on a small (sub-7") screen. Remove the iPhone home button in favor of this gesture and you ruin the user experience. Leave the home button and now we've broken consistency with the iPad (which is one of the main selling points on the iOS ecosystem). Not saying they can't drop the home button, they'd just need a more practical way to do it (for example, webOS/BBX/Win8-style edge swipes)

Have you tried the gestures? There would be no capacitive buttons, only gestures. I don’t know when I last used the button but it was a long time ago. Once I turned the gestures on I couldn’t go back, they are very useful and won’t be wrongly recognized.

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