Deploying multitouch on handsets in the US is.. well.. touchy. Patents and licensing issues scare a number of hardware manufacturers away from deploying it, even when the hardware itself supports it. Take the Motorola Droid for example; the European variant, the Milestone, packed multitouch support out of the box, whilst the US Droid was limited to one finger’s worth of input at a time. Some hardware makers — Palm and HTC, to name a few — have the chutzpah to look at these patents and scoff them off as the nonsense they are, either rolling out their own multi-touch technology or just daring someone to pull them into court for it.[Read more...]