Just the other day we reported that two finger presses were recorded on the T-mobile G1, by a user that goes by the name RyeBrye. Well he decided to make a video to prove his findings for us. The video very clearly shows the two separate traces at the same time.
We are still asking why in the world would Google leave out multi-touch in the T-Mobile G1? They are taking a huge function away from Android users giving the iPhone the upper hand. We certainly hope that Google left it out because it had not been developed yet, with the thought that it would eventually be brought to G1 owners.
The next question is where do we go from here? Clearly there will be many developers that will take advantage of this “hidden feature” and try to further develop the technology. One thing that we believe is a must have is multi-touch browsers integration. While these ideas may be a ways off, it shows great promise for the development of Android and the G1.
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Regarding the hardware level... That was already proven unequivocally by the debug logs which were posted last week - the hardware without any doubts supports and does track multiple fingers.
If anything, the fact that such a crude and rough hack works at all shows a lot of potential for what can be done once the proper support is put in place.
Also, please refrain from making up terms like "capacitive averaging" in an attempt to justify your skepticism.
It's unlikely that Google / T-mobile will ever push out an update to this device that includes official multitouch support, but it's entirely reasonable that multitouch support can be built into the android platform and that such support can be enabled very easily by developers for the G1 with a custom firmware.
The question of how to best implement support for multitouch in the android platform must be addressed - if Google doesn't have a multitouch device in the pipepline it might not be a top priority for them, but as a community we can work with them to get support properly put into the platform so that any future official device will be easy to implement, and any G1 owners who want to run custom builds could get multitouch support as soon as the stuff is in place.
As far as patents and such are concerned, let the lawyers deal with that.
Regarding the hardware level... That was already proven unequivocally by the debug logs which were posted last week - the hardware without any doubts supports and does track multiple fingers.
If anything, the fact that such a crude and rough hack works at all shows a lot of potential for what can be done once the proper support is put in place.
Also, please refrain from making up terms like "capacitive averaging" in an attempt to justify your skepticism.
Terms such as "capacitive averaging" aren't made up at all, anyone who works with touchscreen technology will tell you this - there's no exact name for it, it's what we call it at Panasonic. Almost all touchscreens use a form of capacitive averaging to determine positional input data. Take a look here if you must for a basic example. There are projected non-capacitive averaging screens which only take the very first contact with the screen into account. These are commonly used in touch-keypads and anything that doesn't require 'movement' of the finger/stylus.