14 DAY TRIAL // Xperia X10, the first smartphone that Japanese-Swedish handset vendor Sony Ericsson brought to the market with Google’s Android operating system on boards, is about to get even better.
Following the release of an Android 2.1 software update for the device, increasing the OS version from the original 1.6, the Xperia X10 is also getting ready to offer multi-touch capabilities to its users (see video below).
Although the official stance was that the hardware inside this smartphone does not offer support for multi-touch, it appears that this feature will soon be available for X10 owner out there, officially.
“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,” Sony Ericsson’s Rikard Skogberg notes in a recent post on the company’s blog.
“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,” he continues.
It appears that the company has looked closer into the drivers and software on the Sony Ercisson Xperia X10, and that they concluded that the device would actually be able to provide the functionality.
“What has happened is that some brilliant engineers actually [were] able to change the driver and firmware for the touch digitizer to make some multi touch gestures work,” the blog post continues.
The company is currently working on making the solution as good as it can be, as the plan is to enable Pinch/Zoom in the web browser, as well as Pinch/Zoom in Google Maps.
Moreover, we should expect for third-party applications to be supported as well, though there might be situations when the functionality would be limited.
“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,” the said post continues.
“There has been much online debating around what is “good” and “bad” Multi Touch in competitor phones and this is following the same lines.”
All in all, the goal would be to enable multi-touch gestures, including pinch/zoom, and not to offer support for this feature in games and more.
The video embedded below shows only a prototype of software that would enable multi-touch capabilities on Xperia X10.