If you’ve ever used a Macbook Pro, you know that nothing beats the gesture recognition feature on the Macbook Pro trackpad. Swipe three fingers left on the trackpad to go back in the browser, swipe four fingers up to reveal the desktop, and swipe four fingers down to see thumbnails of all your open windows (the Mac OS X Exposé feature).
Well, rumor has it that the next iPhone home button may feature a gesture area with similar functionality. If the rumors are to be trusted, this home button gesture feature could signal the next revolution in smartphone technology.
With all the competition in the smartphone market, a gesture area on the iPhone home button would help the next iPhone stand apart from Android smartphones and other competitors. The iPhone screen already has decent gesture recognition — pinch to zoom, swipe left and right to move from one home screen to the other, etc. — but expanded gesture recognition would open up a new world of possibilities for the iPhone 5, or whatever the next iPhone is called.
Imagine swiping left on the iPhone home button to go back to the last app you had open, or swiping down on the home button to bring up a list of your recent notifications. The possibilities would be abundant.
What do you think? Would you consider home button gesture recognition a good capability to add to the list of potential iPhone 5 features?