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.
And why is this not enabled by default? This would be a good plus for selling the G1. I see no reason for Google not to enable it and implement some multi-touch stuff.
A good reason would be possible lawsuits or it’s buggy. I have great faith it will be in future Android phones, even if I have to get RyeBrye to activate it for me.