Palm Pre's Center Button Will Bring Up Launcher When No Cards Are Open 21

Dieter recently posted about how the Pre's 'swipe up' gesture seems to have changed since Palm showed off the Pre at CES. I also mentioned this in an article on eWeek's video of the Pre at the beginning of this month. Forum member jhoff80 had noticed that in previous demos, "you'd swipe up and hold for the wave launcher, and a quick swipe up would bring up the full launcher. And to view the card view, you'd press the button."

jhoff80 noticed in the more recent videos from CTIA that "a quick swipe up brings up the card view, and then you need to swipe up again to bring up the full launcher, making the single button entirely redundant."

And today we got a tip from Chris letting us know that he noticed something in Engadget's CTIA video (second video on the right on their Pre "superpage")

"The very very very end of the video shows the
Pre with no cards open. The demonstrator pushed the center button and the launcher pulled up. That surprised me as the center button always has said to only toggle card view."

The pic at the top is a screenshot from the video taken right after the demonstrator had pressed the center button and the launcher came up.  Hmmm, very interesting. Thanks for the tip Chris! Seems that Palm might have some different settings in the Pre to let us choose how we want to bring up the card view and the launcher.

As Dieter mentioned in his article, Palm's Alex Hunter replied on the Palm Blog to a question regarding the change in the 'swipe up' gesture. Hunter stated that he'd have more information about "why did/didn't Palm do this" whenever the Pre is released to the public. He also said that an incredible amount of thought and preparation goes into every little feature and that Palm tests out specific features to see what we prefer. Thanks Palm! That's great to know!

So, I'm pretty sure that Palm is aware that we've been discussing the gesture changes, and they're probably gauging what we don't and do like about the changes made so far. What do you think of how the 'swipe up' gesture seems to have changed and about the center button bringing up the launcher when no cards are open? I really hope that Palm does give us choices/different settings in how the center button and the gesture area works. But I really really think that the Pre is so cool that I'll be happy however those features work for us.