Update 11/4/2009Ignore this post and proceed to this blog post. I was wrong when I said below that Droid doesn't support multi-touch. At least I wasn't alone.
My brother-in-law was swooning over the new Droid phone, which is based on Android 2.0 (see blog post). He was going to get one and wanted to know how it stacked up to the iPhone. I lied. I said it was just as good. Sorry, Joe.
The fact is, that while the Droid is a pretty cool phone it doesn't support multi-touch. That's despite the fact that Android 2.0 supports up to three simultaneous contacts. That's not a huge deal on a mobile phone - as I've said before I'm not even sure multi-touch is necessary on a mobile phone. However, to me if you don't support multi-touch on your device than its simply doesn't stack up to a similar device that does.
OK. So, Droid doesn't support multi-touch. Big deal. It must be some technical-price issue right. Wrong. There are several articles (e.g. here and here) on the web today saying that the European version of the Droid will support multi-touch.
Why does the Europe version support multiple points of contact while the US version does not? The situation gives weight to some of the conspiracy theories around the US versions lack of multi-touch support (i.e. collusion between Google and Apple, fear of Apple multi-touch patent). Anyway, good to be a European if you are a fan of android, not so good if you are a US fan of android.
Update 11/3/2009
Here is a pretty good blog entry that explains the ins-and-outs of the multi-touch patent mess which is stifling the development of multi-touch devices. It contains a number links to equally interesting blog posts by others.
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