Ryan Block of engadget is telling us that Dell is admitting their new XT Tablet PC will not have multi-touch for a while. The new Dell is certainly capable of registering multiple finger touches at the same time since it uses the same capacitive digitizer technology that Apple uses in the iPhone and iPod Touch. Ryan is wondering what Michael Dell meant way back when in his statement that the XT would have multi-touch yet it wasn’t mentioned in the product launch yesterday
This question got me thinking about the term multi-touch and what it really means. The first Tablet PCs with dual digitizers, active and resistive, were termed multi-touch devices long before the iPhone was a gleam in Steve Jobs’ eyes. The term was used to demonstrate that these devices had two digitizers, not that you could manipulative multiple items at the same time with touch. I believe that Lenovo even called their dual-digitizer Tablet option the MultiTouch option. This too was long before the iPhone was launched.
Then Apple launched the iPhone with "multi-touch", the ability to touch the screen in more than one place at the same time and do things. Since then multi-touch has come to be interpreted by almost everyone as that technology from Apple which uses the capacitive digitizer. I wonder if MIchael Dell got bit by Apple taking over the term definition and now Dell must scramble to get that working on the new XT Tablet. I’m not sure how useful that technology will be on a 12-inch screen anyway.