EETI shipping multitouch 7 and 12-inch Panels in H209

EETI (Egalax_empia Technology), the Taiwan-based touch-panel supplier, will start shipping 7 and 12-inch capacitive touch panels in the second half of this year, according to its company president Mei Tsai. We are already starting to see a number of netbooks using touchscreen panels including the Asus Eee PC T91GO, the Touch Book from Always Innovating and Gigabyte’s TouchNote M1028 which was unveiled yesterday. However, the touch-panel technology currently used is resistive. The move to capacitive panels will allow multitouch gestures (such as ‘pinching’).

My guess is that we’re unlikely to start to see any netbooks with capacitive screens until the end of the year, maybe tied in with the launch of Windows 7. Microsoft has spoken of multitouch, being one of the unique selling points of Windows 7. It is likely to be the more premium netbooks that sport these panels at first, but what better way than to tie in with the Windows 7 launch. We’ll keep you posted.