Microsoft's multi-touch plans leak

THE GOOD SHIP Windows Mobile 7.0 has sprung more leaks than the Titanic in the run up to a much rumoured announcement at the World Mobile Congress this month. The latest spillage comes courtesy of Jeremiah Whitaker, a freelance User Experience (UX) designer whose self published notes suggest that Microsoft is working on multi-touch support for Windows Mobile 7.0.

Whitaker has a put up a portfolio link on his Linked-In public profile to his website, where he has published information on some of the non-disclosure work he is doing for a leading cell platform:

"NDA dictates I keep this vague. For a leading cell platform I created UX flows of common controls and usages. After client review I created flash demos. Those demos were then reviewed and passed on to Section Seven development to create interactive prototypes."

The text is accompanied by screen shots of the flash demo with fifteen enticing shots of the UX flows of common controls and usages in action. Unfortunately, Whitaker has had enough sense to grey out the text appended to each image so you can't actually read the text but of particularl note is the third image down on the second set of images. The image very clearly describes a thumb and forefinger multi-touch gesture with a red line extended to connect the two digits.

Whitaker's breadcrumb trail hardly takes Holmesian powers of deduction to unveil. Section Seven is a design and development company based in Seattle. The company personally thanks Whitaker for working across an array of projects and has already worked with Microsoft on previous concept development jobs. He is already named as a Microsoft UX designer on Linked-In and even more obvious is the fact that, listed under Section Seven work on his Asendesign portfolio, is the UX link to the screenshots. Does this man have no shame?

The screenshots are far from conclusive and Whitaker hasn't accidentally leaked information in the strictest sense of the word. That said, I'm willing to bet that Windows Mobile 7.0 will support multi-touch.

The Vole already has native multi-touch support in Windows 7.0 and has enabled multi-touch gestures in its HD version of the Zune. We heard last week that Digitimes sources claimed Windows Mobile 7.0 will be announced at the World Mobile Congress and a leaked research note by Jeffries' analyst Katherine Egbert suggested that Microsoft will be launching a "Zune-like phone" on Windows Mobile 7.0.

Microsoft quite simply can't afford not to. µ