The ongoing mystery with the new batch of Android smartphones has been why, despite having multitouch capability built into the hardware and operating system, the phones still do not support multitouch gestures.  This seemed passable with the Motorola Droid due to the external keyboard, but unacceptable for the NexusOne, which has no other way to input data except for a mostly useless trackball.

In an interview with Motorla CEO Sanjay Jha with LaptopMag, it seems that Motorola, who has become a major player in the Android market with the Droid and Cliq, plans to bypass whatever objections Google seems to have to the multitouch paradigm.  The most likely explanation seems to be some sort of intellectual property spat between Google and Apple, though there was a curious report on PhoneArena that perhaps it was merely because Andy Rubin (VP of Engineering at Google who is overseeing Android development) hates multitouch?

In any case, we’re glad to see this is coming.

[Gizmodo via LaptopMag]

[PhoneArena]