More on the Eee PC 900's multi-touch trackpad

I was running out the door the other day when news broke that there was a ton of information about the upcoming Eee PC 900 on the FCC web site. So I took a quick look, saw that Asus snuck in a little Bluetooth and a multitouch trackpad, and that was about it. But now I want to take a closer look at the touchpad.

First off, this touchpad is significantly larger than the one you'll find on the Eee PC 700 series. At first we figured the larger trackpad was due to customer complaints that the first generation Eee PC's pad was just to friggin small. But now it looks like the new pad is designed to give you enough room to wiggle two fingers around.

There are two sets of gestures that you'll be able to perform with two fingers:

1. Move your fingers apart to zoom in on an image or document, and back together to zoom in.
2. Move both fingers up or down together to make an entire window scroll, and not just the cursor.

The first action will only work in supported applications. Right now that means OpenOffice.org Writer, Impress, Adobe Reader, and the PhotoManager utility. But I suspect we'll see support for more software down the road. It's not clear if there's multitouch support for both the Windows and Linux versions of these programs.