The Sony Ericsson team has been pretty consistent in saying that their inaugural Android handset, the Xperia X10, was not going to get multitouch zooming capabilities, despite the noble efforts of the development community. After been harangued by the masses of X10 owners, SE has changed their tune and has released a video showing their progress on getting pinch-to-zoom multitouch functionality on the Xperia X10. They’re careful to note that the hardware wasn’t optimized for this sort of thing, so there may be some irregularities in complex multitouch scenarios, but for simple pinch to zoom, it should work fine.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 is a decent handset, and was hurting in the software department until it recently got upgraded from Android 1.6 to 2.1. It has a 4-inch 480 x 854 capacitive touchscreen, 1 GHz processor, Wi-Fi, 3G, GPS, and an 8 megapixel camera with flash and HD video recording.
The 2.1 software update to the X10 seems to have done a lot of good to those who have gotten it, and the addition of multitouch pinch zooming through an over-the-air update sometime in Q1 may save some iota of the handset’s respectability. Hopefully Sony Ericsson has learned some lessons and will apply them to the X12 Anzu.
Here’s the video of multitouch working on the Xperia X10 in a more or less official capacity. If these software updates make you want one, be sure to take a look at our review.