“...We’ve been given reason to believe that the company will start by decoupling many of Android’s standard applications and components from the platform’s core and making them downloadable and updatable through the Market, much the same as they’ve already done with Maps. In all likelihood, this process will take place over two major Android versions, starting with Froyo and continuing through Gingerbread. Notice that we said apps and components, meaning that some core elements of Android — input methods, for instance — should get this treatment. This way, just because Google rolls out an awesome new browser doesn’t mean you need to wait for HTC, Samsung, or whomever made your phone to roll it into a firmware update, and for your carrier to approve it — almost all of the juicy user-facing stuff will happen through the Market….“

“Liquid is doing much better than our expectation,” Gianfranco Lanci, president of the Taipei-based company, said in an interview yesterday. “This is why we’re a little bit short of supply.”

The Liquid touch-screen handset, unveiled in October, competes against models from HTC Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Motorola Inc. in the market for phones using the free Android platform. Acer expects its smartphone sales, including those using Microsoft Corp.’s Windows system, to total between 2 million and 3 million units this year, Lanci said.

Read the whole article at BusinessWeek

Of course, it was no secret that Android 2.0 had the framework in place to support this kind of stuff — Moto enabled it all by its lonesome on the Euro-spec Milestone — but it looks like this could be the watershed moment where multitouch finally becomes a must-have feature on Android devices across the board, as Moto CEO Sanjay Jha recently suggested would happen. The new version 3.4′s available as a software update in the Market right now, so grab it if you’ve got your Droid handy.

[Via Engadget]