Well, I guess the cell's size would make for a nice variable to change between price points (cheaper ones having bigger cells).

Individually, each cell has the same precision as your N900 screen... which means that as long as not any two fingers fall on the same cell, the screen will be very, very precise. When two fingers fall on a single cell, that cell will report the average point much like the N900 does.
I do not think that would be a big problem since:
a) With small cell sizes, you would need to have very small fingers to be able to trigger this,
b) You might be able to do more accurate fake multitouch on such a smaller cell.

I think that the ideal solution could be:

• Modify N900 screen driver and insert multitouch emulation directly into it (btw, is it open source?)
• Patch X server for multitouch support

What do you think?

I think you gave yourself the answer.

My proposition is:
A second device in Xorg (like a USB multitouch touchpad based on uTouch).
This device could receive emulated multitouch events.
All the events of the single touch driver will be replicated on that driver.
And and all the rest can stay the same.

Still need a way to script the different algorithms (I have one for a virtual thumbstick + multiple individual buttons (one thumb on the stick and the other pressing and releasing buttons one at time), one for typing fast on a virtual keyboard, multiple buttons (kinda an hybrid between the joypad one and the fast typing one), then there are those for faking the classic gestures, like tilting the device side to side while holding a modifier key to do the twist and fwd/back for pinching, holding a modifier key to turn regular dragging into two finger dragging (with parallel and direction changing variations), for "raw" twofingering use the screen for one finger and the accell+ proximity sensor for the second finger, and so on)

Does the WebOS progs that people have been playing with preenv use a standard way to read multitouch input? And what standard for multitouch input does MeeGo use?

Basically, "different ones". The Meego one probably being the sanest one, depending on what the N900+1 ships with.

My gripes with this thread are:
a) Unaccuracy/uselessness of fake multitouch
b) Lack of applications that would use such input

If you think you've solved both problems, you might be on to something. But I suggest you firstly implement a demo (as a standalone application) or something like that to "polish" the ideas, much like lcuk did.

My software solution (touch&swipe) doesn't use fake multitouch.
And my driver solution is based on standard multitouch drivers and frameworks.

Interesting idea...

Don't look at what happens on the surface (where your fingers are interacting with the screen) but understand what's going on underneath all that...

The system still only sees one point, and that's a big big difference compared to true multitouch devices.

The system sees one point at different times at different locations.
That's very much and enough to emulate all multitouch gestures in a specific way.


Multitouch is not useful on little devices. The screen is to little. And the precision of a finger is nothing against the precision of a stylus.

There are good single touch emulations of all multitouch gestures. We have only to implement them.