It's for all these reasons you mentioned that at least having an alternative to get you "Home" is an excellent idea. That one button is both important and fragile.
I bought a 1st gen. iPod Touch about five months after they came out. In using it, I regularly double-tapped the "Home" button to get at the audio controls without having to fully unlock the device. Result? The "Home" button stopped working a month after the warranty ran out. And since I wasn't "responsible" enough to have bought the AppleCare plan, Apple wasn't interested in doing anything but shrugging and offering me a laughably small discount (something like 10 percent, IIRC) if I traded in the "broken" one.
Do a search and you'll find a lot of people with perfectly good iPods, iPhones, and now iPads that are almost impossible to use normally because one button died.
As for "hoping for the best," the touch screen != a mouse. You can still use a PC without the mouse. But touch screen or "Home" button, the story is the same -- if one dies on you, the device is just about worthless. Say what you want, but I think this would be an excellent design change.
I am a freelance writer. Most of the time, I contract with my newspaper to sell a stories (and the rights thereto) to that one publication. Yet when I search for myself on Google these days, I find more and more links to the full text of my articles on Web sites with names like "freebizarticlessourcedestination.com" (* not sure if that's a real site; I use that name purely for example).
And, more and more often, my name shows up attached to the story without the name of the publication.
Seeing this on some guy's shill site irks me, even though legally it's not my problem - I sold the rights to that story, it's the newspaper's story now. Even so, this reflects on me when it appears I may have written this story for the site in question. I don't write "content" for Web sites; I write for newspapers as a freelance journalist. And I don't like the thought of my work being plagiarized or repackaged, in general, although at this point the money is less of an issue than the annoyance of it being taken out of context.
For a second, I thought I read "a meth lab in your cell phone," and wondered if Kevin Federline's rap album had been made into ringtones
In all seriousness, I could see this sort of program (on a phone or other small-scale wireless device) becoming a tool for people who work in technical fields. The only problem is, there is likely to be a disconnect between the people who aren't afraid of trusting a cellphone for complex operations (i.e. graphing) and those who are still lugging around a TI-81 from the mid-'90s, or one of its decendants. Cellphones might work well for casual mathematics, but who really needs to graph something while out shopping or waiting in line at the bank?
Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian
