Multi-Touch Mobile Browsing – Is it Really That Great?
27 Apr
My Motorola Droid got upgraded to Android 2.1 a couple weeks back, and one of the most hyped new features in the release was support for multi-touch browsing. Now that I’ve gotten use to it for a couple weeks I wanted to share my experience about the new upgrade.
The verdict: I haven’t used my browser any differently than before.
When I would get a chance to play with a friends’ iPhone or when I went in an Apple store to test it out myself I always thought the web browsing was pretty awkward. I got the hang of it, but I hated having to use 2 hands to zoom in on an object, and half the time my zoom attempts became clicks. It was kind of a mess. I’m sure I would get used to it if I used it all the time, but it just seemed somewhat clunky to me. When I got my Motorola Droid I was pretty happy that there was no multi-touch browsing in the beginning. To zoom in I simply tapped the + sign that appeared at the very bottom edge of the screen, and likewise on the – when I wanted to zoom out. It was simple, and even though the button would occasionally get in the way of the page content it was a very rare occurence. The best thing was that I could operate everything with one hand without having to awkwardly strain my fingers to make a pinch or zoom with one hand.
I haven’t figured out why so many people are crazy about multi-touch mobile browsing. Is it just because the iPhone had it from the beginning and everyone got so used to an iPhone. It was weird to me that so many Android fans complained about the lack of multi-touch support and then rejoiced when it finally came. Oh well, I’ll go ahead and keep happily using my single touch browser.
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