Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Gets Multi-touch, Unofficially

Although Sony Ericsson has decided against rolling out FroYo or newer versions of Android for the Xperia X10, there are still a couple of more significant updates in the pipeline. The first of them will introducepartial-multitouch (dual touch), while the other one will spruce up the Timescape and Mediascape applications. As we reported earlier, Japan’s NTT Docomo customers will be the first to receive this update. However, you don’t need to be at the mercy of your carrier or Sony Ericsson to enable dual-touch on your X10.

Bina4y from xda-developers forum has released a patch that should add dual touch support to any ROM for the Xperia X10. The hotfix requires the use of Flashtools, and while the installation procedure is fairly simple, it is not for the faint hearted. If you are not comfortable with messing around with Android, it is highly recommended that you wait for the official update. If you have a rooted handset, you should also follow this guide to enable dual-touch support on all apps that can make use of it.

The biggest benefit of the aforementioned hotfix is that it will enable the pinch-to-zoom gesture on apps like Browser, Angry Birds and Maps. However, Xperia’s multi-touch is broken, like Nexus One’s. Don’t expect more complex gestures like rotation (in Google Maps 5.0) to work. It will also fail wherever more than three inputs or high precision is required.