Deploying multitouch on handsets in the US is.. well.. touchy. Patents and licensing issues scare a number of hardware manufacturers away from deploying it, even when the hardware itself supports it. Take the Motorola Droid for example; the European variant, the Milestone, packed multitouch support out of the box, whilst the US Droid was limited to one finger’s worth of input at a time.
Some hardware makers — Palm and HTC, to name a few — have the chutzpah to look at these patents and scoff them off as the nonsense they are, either rolling out their own multi-touch technology or just daring someone to pull them into court for it. It looks like Motorola might be about to do the same.
In an interview with Laptop Magazine, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha had this to say:
I think you will see us deliver multitouch in the majority of our devices going forward. There’s a complex set of factors, not all of them technical. But I think you’ll see us being proactive on multitouch because the user feedback on multitouch is very good.
So there you have it – Motorola will support multitouch on the “majority” of their devices from here on out. Sure, this could very well mean “the majority of our devices [outside of the US]“, but considering that Sanjay specifically mentions the non-technical factors — that is, the aforementioned licensing holdups, which really only apply in the US — we’ve got hope.
Why do bloggers seem to have such an obsession with multitouch? (I rarely see it mentioned in forums or anywhere else.) It’s a feature. An Apple feature. Nothing more. I have an ipod touch and a droid, and while I admit that pinch/zoom is handy on the touch, I don’t miss it at all on my phone. In fact, after using my droid for a few days after I got it, I used my ipod to surf one day and it took awhile for me to even remember that it was an option- I forgot it was there. Double tapping and the +/- button work just as well. I just don’t think that multitouch is that big of a deal.
multitouch matters for games and other apps where the phone registering multiple inputs at once matters. For browsing, no, it’s not needed. There have been various times where I wished an app supported multitouch though (I have a droid). Apps on the droid are capable of supporting it, it just has to be implemented in the app.
Patents and licensing is killing accessibility, creativity, simplicity…
I don’t think multi-touch is all that important.
It should be an open standard anyway.
Consumer electronic supporting it will only annoy users learning the difference what each of these device has.
Up down left right , pinch and wipe thats alright with me anything else is an extra.
Think of the mess we would be in if ”XEROX” back then ever had solely the ownership of the mouse patent how many incompatible mouse variants there would be on the market.
ah wel whatever.
If anyone is jonesing for multi-touch on the Droid, just install Dolphin Browser from the market. It does pinch and zoom just fine. Has no one tried it besides me?
Anxious Droid users should buy the Latin American version of the Milestone, which a) has multitouch and b) has the same American 3G frequencies.
It is sold in Argentina, for example.