No, Actually, They Won’t

BGR has a story up that has been all the rage around the interwebs today, often reported as nearly verified “fact”.

We have exclusively been told that the reason Apple just added multitouch gestures for the iPad in the latest iOS 4.3 beta is because the iPad will be losing the home button. Yes, we are told that Apple, at some point in time, will remove the home button from the iPad’s design. Instead of button taps, you will use new multitouch gestures to navigate to the home screen and also to launch the app switcher.

Mark my words for future Claim Chowder if you wish, but: This Will Not Happen. Certainly not with the next-gen releases of the various iDevices, and I seriously doubt that it will ever happen. If it does happen, the current gesture in iOS 4.3 will absolutely have to change.

I’m sure that Apple is testing home-button-free iDevices. The Steve has a well-known dislike for buttons of any sort, and Apple tests all sorts of things. But just because they’re trying it out, doesn’t mean it will pass their stringent user-experience requirements and actually make it into a shipping product. And besides, the very fact that the story reports that it is “in testing now” in Cupertino, would seem to invalidate the story’s other claim that this change will make it into the iPad 2. Surely the iPad 2 hardware is fixed at this point!