By admin
17th November 2010.
14:04

Work Ongoing on Pinch Zoom for Xperia X10

Even though the focus of this blog at this point is mostly on the Android 2.1 update of the X10 family I have something else I would like to share with you.
There has also been lots of rumors around this and I just want to clarify what we’re working on and what to expect.
(I will continue posting information on the current SW-update roll-out after this!)

As many of you know, just before the release of the Xperia X10 we saw lots of discussions around any potential support for multi touch.
Myself and Sumit were then very clear on the fact that there were no plans of having X10 supporting multi touch and said so here on this blog mainly to not have you guys hoping for things that just wasn’t planned.

Since then, because of the huge reaction to this and the real desire for multi touch expressed by you the users, there has been lots of investigations going on and I now have some good news to disclose. We aim to enable multi touch (pinch zoom) in an over-the-air update for the X10. The timing for this update is still a bit work in progress but it will for most markets be during Q1 next year.

What has happened is that some brilliant engineers actually was able to change the driver and firmware for the touch digitizer to make some multi touch gestures work. We are still working on perfecting the user experience and I will keep you updated as work progresses.

I also want to be clear on what to expect from this feature. The digitizer in the X10 is not perfect when it comes to multi touch, there will as an example be situations like when the movement of the two fingers cross each other on the X- or Y-axis that could cause strange behavior. (There has been much online debating around what is “good” and “bad” Multi Touch in competitor phones and this is following the same lines.)

Therefore we also will not enable it everywhere but the current plan is to enable it for the following use-cases:
- Pinch/Zoom in the web browser.
- Pinch/Zoom in Google Maps.

Besides that there is also support in third party applications but because of the limitations on e.g. crossing axis there might be situations where it behaves strangely while it will work just fine for most use-cases.
The support is basically for gestures like pinch/zoom so don’t expect e.g. multi touch gaming with buttons pressed simultaneously on different parts of the screen to work.
Let me know if you have specific multi touch enabled apps you want me to test!

Below is a video where I show some of the use-cases and what to expect on a prototype SW in my X10.