Multitouch

A rare weekend post, but I'm excited...

I just pulled down a new game from the Marketplace called Pong Multitouch mainly because of the multitouch claim. It has been my understanding that the Droid did not have this feature that iPhone owners covet. Pong Multitouch claimed to support the Droid's multitouch capabilities. So which is it? Well, to my surprise, the Droid does indeed have multitouch and Pong multitouch does exactly what it says... 2 player pong detecting two fingers at the same time. Neato. So I did a little more digging and found that apparently the Droid's lack of multitouch refers moreso to the fact that the default browser doesn't support it most likely because of Apple's big stack of patents. Bummer. There is, however, a web browser called Dolphin that is free and supports multitouch and the familiar pinch gesture probably because they would love the press of being sued by Apple and having to share a portion of the profits from their free browser with them.

I tried it out and yes it works, but it's not nearly as slick as Apple's Safari browser on the iPhone. For a start, when I pinch and release it continues to zoom a bit further after I've removed my fingers from the screen. Dolphin does let you configure a myriad of other gestures for things like searching, downloading, RSS feeds, ...etc.

My one issue with the Android browsers that Safari does so well still remains an issue, though, and that's just how well Safari lets me double tap on a column and it zooms in perfectly presumably being smart enough to judge the table size of the area I clicked on. The default Android browser seems to overshoot the column ignoring its width assuming I'm centering on something else.

Anyhow, I'm impressed to learn that my Droid HAS multitouch afterall and hope that perhaps some developers will begin to use it. I did go back and test yesterday's review game Android Invaders and verified that it doesn't support multitouch so I presume developers have to code to explicitly enable it.