The iPhone’s success with multitouch has been phenomenal, and not without good reason. Multitouch is a valuable asset to a friendly interface, a feature-rich environment, and to a myriad of apps that take advantage of that feature. Now Synaptics has unveiled the workings of touchscreens that are capable of registering up to ten touches at any given time. This will give “multitouch” an entire new level of complexity; entirely new apps, games, and system features will be able to take advantage of having up to ten touches at once, though on I think anything beyond five or maybe six touches is pushing humans’ abilities to touch a screen and hold the device with the same hand. These beauties’ sensors can be built in sizes up to eight inches, meaning that it can be implemented in phones and MIDs and even the smallest of netbooks. Synaptics has said to keep an eye out for these buggers in 2010– not to far from now.
Notably, “keyboard rollover”.
Keyboard rollover is the ability to know which keys are being hit, even if a key has already been pressed. Fast typists can easily encounter this. Without keyboard rollover, characters are lost.
I have not tried any of the tablet on screen keyboards (for example, the one on the CrunchPad), but it would not surprise me if any of the current ones actually have keyboard rollover.
Back In The Day, keyboard rollover was an advertised feature of some keyboards and/or computer systems.
Nowadays, we simply take it for granted in modern keyboards.
But on a touch screen, unless specifically accounted for in a multi-touch environment, an on screen keyboard would lack such a facility.
Hummm this would be nice in a big screen
Something like Minority Report or as any good sci fi movie with multitouch screens with a few people around them 
I was thinking the *exact* same thing!
Best thing is: we won’t even need the stupid gloves!
…here we come…
A touch piano which can play real chords but also smooth multi-toned glissando becomes a possibility.
Seriously, just buy a piano. If you can’t afford a baby grand a Schimmel upright is a nice piano.
Gonna disagree with the Schimmel recommendation. I have one at my house, and though it can sound beautiful, especially in the absolutely crystal clear higher registers, the action of the keys is utter s—. So much so that it makes a very noticeable difference in my playing when I play on any other piano.
I realize we don’t need more than 10. But why is it limited to 10? I can see 2 being harder than 1, and 3 being possibly a bit harder than 3, but once you get the ability to deal with three colinear points, how could 4 to 50 be any harder?
Probably because, unless you’re a mutant, you only have 10 fingers. Unless of course you intend on using toes, fingers, and other uhm, devices
I agree, my Amp goes to 11.