One of the common arguments about the Google Android T-Mobile G1 is it’s lack of multi-touch input support. However, the word now is the old G1 just may be able to handle multi-touch after all, at least on the hardware end.

Apparently some coder going by the handle of RyeBrye, whilst tearing his T-Mobile G1’s guts apart piece by piece happened to discover an interesting artefact. It appears the driver for the Synaptics touch-screen has some code commented out, and after recompiling the kernel with this code back in, he was able to track two finger presses at once.

So it seems the hardware can handle multi-touch, so just why isn’t there multi-touch on the T-Mobile G1 s a bit of a quandary. We presume it is probably a patents issue but can’t be sure, either way multi-touch probably won’t be showing up on the G1 anytime soon.

Source — mobilecrunch