A significant gesture
What a difference a year makes. Last February Google CEO Eric Schmidt was still an Apple board member and, according to a Venture Beat story, Google had decided not to introduce multi-touch functionality to Android, to avoid treading on Apple's toes.
Since then Schmidt has resigned and the two companies have set about each other in a way that only former best friends can. Google and Apple are both looking to grab as big a piece of the mobile Internet pie as they can, as evidenced by their respective acquisitions of AdMob and Quattro, the spat over Google voice, iPad vs. Chrome OS and, of course, Google launching the Nexus One.
The latest escalation of this mounting conflict sees Google finally introduce multi-touch functionality to the Nexus One (although Google just refers to it as 'pinch-to-zoom'), as well as Google Goggles, a new version of Google Maps and a fix to improve 3G connectivity.
One of the most paradigm-changing features of the iPhone has been its gesture-driven user interface. Multi-touch enables gesture-driven interaction by recognising multiple points of contact with the screen and interpreting their movement relative to each other. Microsoft introduced this functionality in Windows 7, so it's reasonable to assume Windows Phone 7 will have it too and Android will start to look deficient without it.
Google is walking a tightrope here, however. There's no evidence these features have been released for the whole of Android, so they're either specific to the phone or Android 2.1 releases. On one hand Google can say it's using the Nexus One as a public beta tester for features soon to be released across Android, but on the other it's giving first-to-market advantage to a product it sells and profits from.
We have to assume companies like HTC and Motorola, who seem to have staked their futures on producing Android-based handsets, will be looking at all this special attention Google's paying to the Nexus One with extreme suspicion.
