T-Mobile G1 may not be as fancy as iPhone, but it’s still a great smartphone. T-Mobile or HTC does not announce the first Google Android phone screen is compatible with multi-touch, but somehow it can be. A programmer wrote a small program that can track 2 fingers on the screen.
In the video, the programmer use 2 fingers to draw dots and lines. It worked, but not so smooth. He said he will release the demo program later on. It may not be the perfect multi-touch T-Mobile G1 screen, but at least it can be done. When can I have a better photo browser in Android OS?
[via RyeBlog]
The main reason it is slow is because of how the demo hack was implemented – I’ve got one thread that is basically constantly polling a device file to look for the touchscreen output getting dumped… the reason I did it that way was to just get a demo built without having to do the hard work of properly putting things in place in the framework to do it.
I have no reason to believe it will be slow once it is properly built – If anything, the fact that this ghetto end-run hack around the event system actually works reasonably smoothly is actually quite impressive.
I think with a few interested developers helping, things could move forward relatively quickly.