Google Android multi-touch video demo

The T-Mobile G1 has the same capacitive touch-screen as the iPhone and BlackBerry Storm, but it’s lack of multi-touch features is keenly felt. Zooming in and out of a web page is particularly painful, since it involves repeated taps on two zoom buttons, but they only appear after tapping the screen to begin with.

Google Android (the operating system used on the G1) developer Ryan Gardner clearly feels similarly dissatisfied with the arrangement, but rather than just moan about it on a web site, he’s done something about it – and here’s a YouTube video that shows the result of all his hard work.

Apple has applied for some patents on multi-touch technology and its associated use, but Microsoft has demonstrated similar touch-sensitive screens, albeit on a much larger scale. So, it remains to be seen whether other smartphone manufacturers will be able to deploy similar multi-touch features and while Ryan hacked solution isn’t perfect, it at least shows that it’s possible with Android.

Here’s what Ryan says about his efforts:

The performance of this kind of polling is not that great. There are a few quirks to the multi-touch aspect of the G1 - but the most important thing that I see is that even though it might not be a perfect multi-touch screen capable of detecting millions of discrete touches - just being able to track 2 fingers should give me the only thing I really want… which is the ability to one day pinch to zoom in on the browser and get rid of those silly magnifying glasses.

[ Multi-Touch Proof of Concept Video via Google Android News]