Follow TechBlips on Twitter
G1 capable of multi-touch input? Looks like it.
MobileCrunch —
... Whenever the G1 vs iPhone debate gets underway, iPhone purists are quick to flag the G1’s lack of multi-touch input. Turns out, it might just support it afterall - at least on the hardware end. Whilst tearing his G1’s workings apart line-by-line, a crafty coder going by RyeBrye came across an interesting artifact. It seems the driver for the Synaptics touchscreen has some code commented out; by recompiling the kernel with said code back in, he was able to enable tracking two finger presses at once. ...
G1 capable of multi-touch input? Looks like it.
CrunchGear —
... Whenever the G1 vs iPhone debate gets underway, iPhone purists are quick to flag the G1’s lack of multi-touch input support. Turns out, it might just be able to handle it after all - on the hardware end, at least. Whilst tearing his G1’s workings apart line-by-line, a crafty coder going by RyeBrye came across an interesting artifact. It seems the driver for the Synaptics touchscreen has some code commented out; after recompiling the kernel with said code back in, he was able to track two finger presses at once. ...
G1 Can Handle Multi-Touch Afterall?
AndroidGuys —
... The folks over at RyeBry have done some sleuthing and found that with some work, the G1 shows it should be capable of two finger touching. ...
The G1's Deepest, Darkest Secret: Hidden Multitouch [Rumor]
Gizmodo —
... Some resourceful folks at the #android IRC channel and RyeBrye, after realizing that the G1's Synaptics touch screen might be able to handle multiple inputs, say they were able to re-enable some commented-out code in the phone's touchscreen driver and log some multitouch gestures. The lack of multitouch in the first Android phone was a minor disappointment, albeit an understandable one — encroaching on Apple's ...
G1 screen can handle multi-touch
Mobility Site —
... Being Android a SO based on Linux it was not a big surprise to see a lot of developers going deep to find all kind of secrets hidden in the source code. According to this post, the T-Mobile G1, or at least part of them, can handle multi-touch. ...
The T-Mobile G1’s hardware supports multi-touch?!?!
Android Authority —
Blogger RyeBrye has found that the T-Mobile G1 outputs data suggesting that the G1’s touchscreen display has support for multi-touch, something previously thought to be only available to iPhone users. Code from the debugging console demonstrate that the T-Mobile G1 can indeed track two fingers. As multi-touch capabilities have always been appreciated on the Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface, one can only wonder why HTC chose to leave off multi-touch support from the G1. Patents, and future developments may explain why, but we don’t realy know yet. G1 owners can only hope ...
G1 Multi-Touch Exists, Amputated
Android Phone Fans —
... that was commented out - since it does seem to be based on pressure and putting fingers on opposite corners and pressing lightly still shows a 1 for “w” - but placing 2 fingers close together and pressing hard will show a 15 for “w” - so I’m not entirely convinced of this)
Now that all of this has become rather public, hopefully we’ll get some official information as to the who-what-when-where-why of the G1 multi-touch amputation. What do YOU think?
[Via RyeBrye]
T-Mobile G1 Android software hack enables multi-touch input
Obsessable News Feed —
... . Intrigued that the same technology may be in the G1, he looked through the touchscreen's software driver source code, finding code in place to support the finger-tracking mode, but that had been "commented out" — turned off by Google. By re-enabling the code and building it in to the driver, he was able to put together a crude hack proof-of-concept, showing simultaneous input with two fingers, with the software recognizing them as two separate touches. ...
Did Google Leave Multi-Touch Out Of Android At Apple's Behest?
Techdirt —
... , and Google didn't want to jeopardize its relationship with the company. VentureBeat sources the claim to an anonymous "Android team member", while a recent multi-touch hack for the G1 device was made by uncommenting several lines of code. This would indicate the capability was in the OS, but later "commented out", meaning it was left in the code, but preceded with an instruction for it to be ignored by the device. If this is true, it's scary to think that companies would make these sorts of arrangements in which one competitor gets to determine the features of another's ...
