Droid Does/Doesn’t Have Multi-Touch Gestures

The Motorola Droid is launching this Friday with multi-touch gestures disabled in all of the applications that come on the phone, including the browser. But the European version of the phone, dubbed the Milestone, fully supports multi-touch gestures. In a statement, Motorola has disabled multi-touch on the U.S. version of the Droid to meet “consumer needs.”

So what’s the deal here? Eric Zeman from InformationWeek asked Motorola and received the following statement:

In response to your question regarding differences between MILESTONE and DROID, we work very closely with our carriers and partners to deliver differentiated consumer experiences on our mobile devices. At times, similar devices come to market with different features, depending on the region, carrier preferences and consumer needs.

In other news, Rob Jackson from Phandroid put together a demo video showing that the Droid DOES support multi-touch gestures. In the below video he launches a third-party photo editor and pinches and zooms away.