@roger_27: Fair point, and I should have clarified. What I was meaning is that the standard "4-wire" resistive touch panels found on most devices out there are not natively able to support multitouch. To my knowledge, that is the type that the N900 is using. You are entirely right, however, that it isn't impossible based on the sensing technology itself.

@maxximuscool: I'm sure people at Nokia know about it, and I'm also quite sure the technique isn't new. I haven't kept up with the auto-rotate issue, but that's completely different. Auto-rotation is a design decision relating to software, which could be disabled or enabled for plenty of good reasons on either side. "Fake-multitouch", as in this example, is a workaround for the actual hardware, and workarounds - pretty much by definition - aren't things you ship by choice. Besides, unlike auto-rotation, it's something that each application would have to implement itself, rather than (mostly) a property of the graphical subsystem of the OS. There's nothing stopping you or others from adding support for this to your apps, but I think I can safely say that Nokia won't be shipping it, and I don't think they should, either. It would just lead to problems, and probably look bad on their part. For one thing, currently the importance of multitouch when buying a phone is just preference; imagine if suddenly it was a choice between "multitouch" and "multitouch emulation" -- no matter how you spin it, it would come off as inferior, rather than just preference. That's aside from all the technical and support issues.