I found out last night that Apple postponed the implementation of multitouch gestures on the iPad until the release of iOS 5 and this morning I found out that Apple tested these multitouch gestures even on the iPhone. For the iPad tablet, it would be logical and welcome to implement these multitouch gestures, but for the iPhone, which has a 3.5-inch screen, it is quite inconvenient to use them. The possibility was discussed removing the Home button from iDevices and its replacement with these multitouch gestures, and for the iPad I 100% agree to see this implementation. For the iPhone, on the other hand, I don't think something like this is necessary because we are talking about a mobile phone that must allow the user to work on it with one hand.
If Apple were to remove the Home button from the iPhone, then we would probably have a bigger screen, but we wouldn't be able to exit an application using one hand. Removing the Home button will complicate the way of using the phone quite a bit because all users will have to learn to make gestures with 5 fingers to exit the applications. My opinion is that Apple will implement multitouch gestures on the iPhone 5 but will leave the Home button to analyze the feedback provided by users and if this is positive then we could have iDevices without a Home button right from the launch of the iPad 3.
A phone without buttons is probably an ideal towards which some mobile phone manufacturers are heading, but for users, buttons are necessary to perform simple functions without going through a whole menu of settings. On the iPhone, I would like to see a camera button that would allow me to open the camera instantly and allow me to take pictures without having to press the screen (I know there are alternatives for those with jailbreak). Why would Apple implement multitouch gestures on the iPhone? Probably to be one step ahead of the competition, which is still far from achieving such a thing.
What do you think?
