Multi-touch Gestures on the iPhone (iOS 4.3 beta)

Multi-touch is an incredibly cool technology, I especially love my Macbook Pro just because of the magic trackpad. Multi-touch gestures are incredibly convenient and do a great job increasing usability. Recently on the beta version of iOS 4 Apple showed off a bunch of cool multi-touch gestures, similar to those on the magic trackpad but for the iPad. It actually looks like these gestures could be incredibly useful as far as managing multiple apps are concerned.

Although multi-touch gestures are useful and cool, there is a line when they just become ridiculous or inconvenient. Well it seems that Apple has included these multi-touch features in the iPhone as well. When looking at these multi-touch gestures, using 3 or 4 finger gestures on such a small screen seems to be more of an annoyance than a help. When multitasking on an iPhone, I personally would just double tap the home screen, seems a lot easier than trying to fit my entire hand on the screen while attempting to a gesture.

Gestures would be cool, however the screen real-estate just can’t support the gestures that Apple is attempting to add (they need to find a way to simplify them so they are appropriate for a screen of that size).