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There has been a lot said about the Xperia X10 and its support, or lack of it, for multitouch. Whether you like the feature or not, it is something of a “Phantom Menace” that perpetually rumbles on in the interwebs and with the X10 in particular we have endured quite the saga in terms of will it or won’t it!

What seems like an eternity ago, the X10 was announced with a capacitive screen but no support for multitouch and was met with incessant rants from users all demanding the same thing in rather an “Attack Of The Clones”. Sony Ericsson suffered greatly with negative reviews flowing in, not helped by the outdated OS, and it seemed the “Revenge Of The SE-haters” was stronger than ever. However, keen fans were offered “A New Hope” when Sony Ericsson suggested via their blog that the feature would be added in future updates:

That hope was soon dashed though as the “Empire Struck Back” when SE stated that the X10 would not be receiving multitouch and lacked support for the feature through both software and hardware limitations:

It appeared all hope was lost as without hardware support there was surely no way back but on a remote moon some determined hackers were not about to give up and managed to make rudimentary multitouch gestures work on the X10. SE apparently noticed this and decided, not to be shown up by the community, that they should get in on the act themselves which brings us officially to the “Return Of The Multitouch”!

Today SE announced on their blog that work is ongoing on bringing basic multitouch gestures such as pinch zoom to the X10 inthe next OTA firmware update!

You may be thinking “why did SE say the phone lacked hardware support”? Well in a way it still does and the X10 will only be given basic multitouch features, essentially the screen digitizer only supports dual touch and will encounter problems with some actions. This leads to certain restrictions as explained and demonstrated by SE in the video below. I believe it is these restrictions which led SE to previously dismiss multitouch support but it seems they have decided that the benefits of partial feature support are greater than the potential criticisms of it.

So when can we expect this update? Well Q1 2011 is stated but we all know how to take estimated deadlines from SE…

Personally I like to see the company reacting to feedback and improving their products accordingly, even if it does take an age. We can at least see that SE are prepared to listen and we should respect the fact that they may be taking a risk here by rolling out something which could cause a few problems to satisfy popular demand.

PS- I realised only after starting this article and researching the previous posts that scotsboy had previously done something similar with the puns but, I started so I finished lol!

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