Apple’s iPhone is making multitouch all the rage on mobile phones but laptop makers are not rushing to add the technology to traditional notebooks.

Multitouch, which lets users control applications through gestures on a screen, may not be the best interface for laptops because of the size and placement of the screen. In addition,apple laptop battery, there’s little integration between touchscreens and most software.

“You don’t see a lot of touchscreen notebooks because it is not intuitive to reach up and start touching the screen when there is a good keypad,apple a1175,” says Paul Moore, senior director product management at Fujitsu, one of the world’s biggest laptop makers.

Some pundits, such as Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan,apple a1185 , argue that
computer interfaces of the future will likely blend multitouch with gestures and physics (using accelerometers to detect bumps, shakes or the device’s orientation in space).

Already, many computing devices are using some or all of these techniques. Nintendo’s Wii uses physics — the location and movement of the controller through space — to control actions on screen while multitouch is becoming the interface of choice for smartphones like Google’s Android and Samsung’s Instinct.

On small screens, apple m8403,multitouch makes sense for tasks such as expanding views, making edits and manipulating objects onscreen. But move up to a notebook, and the technology begins to lose out on ease of use.

So far, touch interface on conventional laptops has been largely confined to the touchpad.

Earlier this week Synaptics, which provides touchpads to a number of mobile and PC makers, introduced new gestures such as the two-finger flick,apple powerbook g4, which allows users to flick horizontally or navigate through documents and images and? “ChiralRotate” that lets users move one finger in a circular motion to rotate images and graphics.

These gestures will be available to current owners of Synaptics touchpads; users can just update the drivers from the company’s website to get the new capabilities.

“These are going to be our baseline touchpad features and we won’t be charging users any premium for it,” says Linda Cecil, powerbook g4 15inch battery, product marketing manager for PC products at Synaptics.

While interesting, gesture-based touchpad interfaces are unlikely to make a big dent in the way users interact with their computers, says
Anthony Andre, professor of human factors and ergonomics at San Jose State University and principal of Interface Analysis Associates, a Bay Area usability consulting firm.

“Touchpads are a fairly limiting interface because the size of them is fairly small to begin with,” says Andre. “Once you are constraining your gestures,apple a1012,apple m8244 , apple a1079 , apple a1078 , apple a1148 touch is no longer such a natural thing to do.”