I love to be proven wrong on occasions and this is one of those times. Just yesterday I went over the minimum specs of the new Windows Mobile 7 phones and one of the features is support for multi-touch screens. I figured though that that feature would pretty much eliminate the possibility of upgrading a WinMo 6.5 phone to WinMo 7 since the soon to be launched 6.5 version from MS doesn't support multi-touch. That may have been an erroneous assumption.

I love to be proven wrong on occasions and this is one of those times. Just yesterday I went over the minimum specs of the new Windows Mobile 7 phones and one of the features is support for multi-touch screens. I figured though that that feature would pretty much eliminate the possibility of upgrading a WinMo 6.5 phone to WinMo 7 since the soon to be launched 6.5 version from MS doesn't support multi-touch. That may have been an erroneous assumption.

It is true that WinMo 6.5 doesn't support multi-touch - that hasn't changed. What has changed is HTC has worked some of their magic again and included a capacitive screen. They have then gone and written drivers to support multi-touch. WMPowerUser has a video of the device, called he HTC Leo and it clearly shows someone using two fingers to move stuff around.

For the most part, this would really only work on software HTC itself puts on the device, like the photo album app. I am sure other WinMo 6.5 developers could write multi-touch apps too, but I am not sure that is terribly economic for one device. If HTC began putting this on all of their future WinMo 6.5 devices, it would start to make more sense.

I don't know the full specs of the Leo either, so there may be other limiting factors that could prevent a WinMo 7 upgrade in its future, The good news is, all of the other specs are easily achieved on a WinMo 6.5 device without doing anything special. Maybe there will be some WinMo 6.5 to WinMo 7 upgrades yet. One can always hope.

Source: InformationWeek