Multi-touch has arrived to Windows Mobile at last - courtesy of HTC
August 20, 2008 [Pocket PC phone] | By Edward J. R.
We were asking Microsoft about support for multi-touch even before iPhone arrived to the market (see our report from Microsoft press conference where Microsoft unveiled UMPC for the first time) but the first time the multi-touch arrives to Windows Mobile is not due to Microsoft, but thanks to HTC!
Here is a picture that proves it (the lines on both sides we made while using 2 fingers at once!):
Here is how it works:
- not the display but the surface under the display of HTC Touch Diamond, HTC Touch Pro and other compatible phones from HTC - is actually a capacitive touch-area with multi-touch
- by now this surface is used mainly for "wheel" gestures for example to zoom-in/out (see our article about zooming with wheel in HTC Touch Diamond) or to fast-forward in player etc., and the multi-touch-ness of this surface is not used, but since it works (as seen above) HTC could implement "finger pinching gesture" and "finger spreading gesture" - for zooming for example. One could also implement "2 finger moving" for panning gesture for example too. One is for sure: it is supported in hardware and software can read it
- HTC previously already was revealing that the area under display is a capacitive touch-area, but nothing was mentioned about multi-touch - not all capacitive touch-areas are multi-touch at the same time!
- note: latest subnotebooks (netbooks) Eee PC from Asus have multi-touch touch-pad and no display with multi-touch but they use several multi-touch gestures (which work!) - what proves that HTC could do similar thing with multi-touch support in HTC Touch Diamond and HTC Touch Pro
- to try it yourself download ZIP file here and use file NavDbgTool.exe from it
- you can see this multi-touch in action on a video here
Commentary: we think that it would be huge mistake of Microsoft not to include support for multi-touch in Windows Mobile 7. Now that Apple iPhone and iPhone 3G support multi-touch and many applications that take advantage of it have been released, it is obvious that no modern smartphone platform can get away without multi-touch. The fact that existing phones support multi-touch, albeit not in the display, shows that it is feasible in Windows Mobile too.
Credit: wmpoweruser.com (submitted through web form).
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