BlackBerry Tablet or Swipe Gesture Patent?

We've uncovered a patent filed on April 1, 2010 showing what could be a tablet design touch-screen device. The patent is about a soft-key escape button. The patent describes how you could hold your finger for a period of time or do a swipe gesture to bring up the close button on an application or window.

The touch-screen device used for the patent doesn't have any buttons. The finger also appears fairly smaller in size compared to the touch-screen device. We could be reading into the image too much, but usually RIM will use a mobile device image to demonstrate the touch functionality. It would also make sense to us that a BlackBerry tablet wouldn't necessarily need external buttons.

Whether or not this is indirectly showing the tablet, we are certain a tablet is in the works. This patent at least shows that RIM is in fact working on swipe gestures to integrate in the OS, which we hear should be primitively added to BlackBerry 6. The patent shows different swipe gestures, which would lead us to think RIM could be working on something similar to BumpTop, which was recently purchased by Google for their Android OS.

What are your thoughts on this? Could this be an indirect tablet patent or just a patent demonstrating swipe gestures on a touch-screen or both? Would you like to see different kind of swipe gestures in BlackBerry 6?