Multitouch Gestures

Dell lists the M4500, E6410, and E6510 as having "multitouch trackpads".
Does anyone here know what the gestures are, and can you list them?

I'm wondering if it's possible and/or worth it to upgrade to a E6410 palmrest when it becomes available to get the gestures.

I tried to install the E6410 drivers (apparently an Alps pad as well) on my E6400 but I didn't get anything new...

 

Multi-touch requires hardware support. A driver upgrade won't enable this feature if the trackpad doesn't report more then one finger.

I have an M6500 that has a multi-touch trackpad along with the jog shuttle. the gestures it supports are 2-finger scrolling, Pinch zoom, Rotation, and Privacy Mode (a sweep of 4 fingers over the trackpad)

The only multi-touch feature I have enabled is the 2-finger scrolling. This makes it consistent with my Mac Book Pro 17; which helps when I switch between the two of them.

However the Apple implementation is much more refined. On the M6500, the scrolling feels "jagged" and clunky compared to the smooth scrolling of the Mac Book Pro. Actually, I am pretty critical of Macs, but 2-finger scrolling is something that I must give credit to Apple for doing right. The Alps/Dell implementation is still useful despite its clunkiness, so I can't complain.

As for zoom and rotation, I tried this on may Mac Book Pro and couldn't get used to it. It was too easy to accidentally zoom or rotate. Because I don't have it enabled on the Mac, I also never enabled it on the M6500.

 

Does that mean basically all Synaptics touchpads, even on older notebooks, have that hardware capability? Since now, they can use hacked drivers or that scybe program which looks pretty cool...

 

I can't speak for "all" Synaptics touchpads. But having worked for one of the largest mouse makers in the world which sold a line of touchpads to OEM in the late 90s (not anymore unfortunately, the market was ceded to Alps and Synaptics), some of our touchpads supported multi-touch, whereas some didn't. This was mainly used for the "side scrolling" interface at the time.

It all depended on what the customer (HP/IBM/etc) wanted, and most factored cost. At the time, multi-touch was a feature that may have been supported in firmware/hardware, but not enabled in many drivers or in the OS User32 APIs. (This was during the time when the mouse wheel was just getting started!)

If I was to make an educated guess, I would say Synaptics probably makes a hardware platform that does report multi-touch, and has done so for a while, yet due to a constraint, they disable the feature at their driver level. Perhaps there are licensing issues, they charge more to enable it to the customer (Lenovo/HP/etc) and the customers didn't buy it, they have other marketing agreements, etc. This freeware utility you mentioned unlocks it. In contrast, Alps HW, until recently does not...

However, it could be even more complicated then that. Alps/Synaptics might be getting their capacitive touch sensor parts for yet another vendor, and with the explosion of multi-touch, that might all that is now available, bringing Alps into the multi-touch world.

But who knows...

 

I was banking a little on the fact that the ALPS wouldn't be that basic.
I'd go for the 2 finger scrolling anytime - I simply love the feature. The zoom and rotation would be nice, but the E6400's pad seems too small to do this properly.
I'd also appreciate a 3 finger swipe gesture to change tabs (as opposed to going forward/back)...

I'll wait until someone reviews the E6410. If it looks good, I'll try to buy the part - since this is a business grade computer, I'd expect the parts to be intercompatible.

 

Hah, you've gotten pretty awesome mileage out of your E6400. If this ends up working, that's fantastic. Let us know what part number you end up buying and what it costs -- I want a multitouch trackpad but I don't know how much I care about paying for i5/i7 parts right now especially with the E6400 chilling on Outlet.

 

I have seen a post someone managing to enable 2-finger scrolling on a E6400 on ubuntu. So there must be a way to enable multi touch gestures on the E6400