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, 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," 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, touch is no longer such a natural thing to do."

That's where multitouch, which gives users the freedom to interact with the entire screen could be a winner. But for multitouch to be truly useful, it has to be well integrated with applications and offer users some value beyond a cool factor.

"I don't think there's inherently anything great about multitouch unless it is mapped to a functionality," says Andre. "Multitouch on notebooks would be a lot more interesting if manufacturers identified the top five things that are arduous to do with a keyboard and would be easier to do with multitouch," says Andre.

That's why notebook makers are waiting for Microsoft's Windows 7 OS, the successor to Vista.

Earlier this year, Microsoft showed off the multitouch interface for Windows 7 but with the operating system unlikely to be released before 2010, it will be a while before laptop buyers can see it on their screens.

Slowing adoption is a lack of standard touch gestures used universally across manufacturers and applications. With the wide diversity of devices available, users are never sure what a particular touch gesture on their laptop will translate into, says Andre.

It's a little like the voice commands system available in cars today, he says. "Most drivers never use it because they don't know what commands are available and how to activate them," says Andre.

"Similarly with touch gestures there is nothing intuitive about what's natural and what's allowed or not."

Multitouch may be a better suited for convertible PCs that transform from a notebook to a tablet PC when the screen is rotated.

"If you put a notebook in a slate mode, you are talking about a platform that is more gesture friendly than the clamshell," says Moore.

Fujitsu plans to introduce multitouch into some of its 12-inch screen notebooks in the middle of next year when it hopes the technology will be a little more mature, says Moore. But the company is still betting it will be convertibles and tablets featuring multitouch that will find greater adoption among users, rather than traditional notebooks.

Meanwhile, Lenovo and Dell have restricted touch technology to either touch-sensitive controls for volume and multimedia use or to tablet PCs.

"Increasing the amount of touch technology we have on our consumer laptops is certainly something we're looking at," says a Lenovo spokesperson while acknowledging that a touchscreen in a traditional notebook is not part of the company's lineup for now.

Even HP which has been among the first to introduce the Touchsmart range of PCs is unlikely to have a touchscreen-based notebook for another 18 months, according to a recent report.

Multitouch notebooks will truly take off only when business applications are created to make touch a part of the user interface, says Moore.

Currently, touch interfaces seem to be limited to applications involving photo editing or scrolling through documents, but when used in software for verticals such as insurance, healthcare and automotive, it could have enough of an impact to get PC makers to add it more enthusiastically to their products.