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Droid Touchscreen Less Accurate Than iPhone's
gyrogeerloose writes "A test published by MOTO labs comparing the accuracy and sensitivity of smartphone touchscreens among various makers gave the iPhone top marks ahead of HTC's Droid Eris, the Google-branded Nexus One and the Motorola Droid. The test was conducted within a drawing program using a finger to trace straight diagonal lines across the screens and then comparing the results. While it's not likely that a smart phone user is going to draw a lot of lines, the test does give some indication of which phones are most likely to properly respond to clicking on a link in a Web browser."
This is not the droid you're looking for.
They dont seem to mention the Iphone generation anywhere. Is it fair to compare the third generation of a product to new products out there right away ? I think other phones can pick up on touch sensitivity etc in future generations.
Was the program written to the same quality in all platforms? Or did they just slap together one quickly to get some juicy headline out? A more worthwhile test would be to go to the same websites in the same stock browsers and log the number of error clicks. Blah.
If you can't even draw a straight line, or the line is offset by a certain amount of pixels, the user is going to have a hell of a time clicking on links, presings tiny buttons, typing with an on-screen keyboard, etc, so not only would he have problems actually "drawing a picture" with his finger. This was actually a very good test.
I own an iPhone, and I can draw complex images with my finger, scrult a 3D sculpture with a particular program I have, and accurately type and click. I have nothing to compare it to but i know how accurate the iPhone is.
It is when the new products are positioned to be direct competitors of the third gen product.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class, especially since I rule.
It's perfectly fair if that "3rd generation" product came out half a year before "disadvantaged" contenders.
BTW, why only big touchscreen devices? There were supposed to be, y'know, cheap ones with Android by now.
One that hath name thou can not otter
How would it NOT be fair to compare current phones to current phones?
I think future generations of the iPhone will make my [noun] [adjective]. Should we just go ahead and say it's a feature today?
Yes it is fair. This is only information. A consumer only cares about how the current product works.
I have to admit that I am somewhat underwhelmed. I got the G1 shortly after it came out a year and a half or so ago, and the touchscreen definitely falls short of what it could be. It is FAR less responsive than the iphone's, and the accuracy could indeed be better. I was coming from a winmo 5 device, so i'm still incredibly happy with it, relatively speaking.
So the big question is whether or not all the manufs of android devices are using the same screen/screen chips, or if android has a fundamental problem interpreting data off the screen?
Does whether or not you can draw diagonal lines on a screen really make a difference? As long as you can still click web links and the on-screen keyboard (where applicable) then who cares?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
While it's not likely that a smart phone user is going to draw a lot of lines, the test does give some indication of which phones are most likely to properly respond to clicking on a link in a Web browser."
A "gaming-grade" mouse and surface might have better sensitivity but I won't likely see a difference in browsing.
No mention of the N900.
Drawn on N900. LOL...I cringe at how bad this looks (though it is unfinished)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Although drawling lines might be important to some, what really matters to most smartphone users is how the phone responds to misclicks. Is it able to detect it and adjust accordingly? There is more to it then the accuracy of the screen. You are using your phone while standing or walking so even if the screen is 100% accurate you probably won't be. What kind of correction algorithm the phone has to compensate for that?
Of course creating a considerate test is too much trouble and just saying that the iPhone touchscreen is more accurate then Google's scores you plenty of apple-love.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
It doesn't follow that a lack of accuracy from dragging in a painting app would affect click accuracy in a browser at all. For example, the accuracy could degrade the longer you hold your finger to the screen due to moisture building up on your fingertip or due to reduced capacitance as the blood flow is restricted.
If you want to test point accuracy then write an app to test that; don't test something completely different and then leap to a potentially inaccurate conclusion.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
They are testing a first generation iPhone. This test is interesting, but not really useful. As some of the comments point out, diagonal lines really aren't the best indicator for accuracy when hitting links or whatever. As usual, the lack of consistency that comes from using a single human being comes into play. While you don't need a machine that always draws perfectly straight lines, you need a machine (or guide) that draws the same lines for each phone.
Some extra detail from the story. The iPhone has poor detection along the edges (basically flattens out diagonals into vertical or horizontal lines), the Nexus One has the best. Not that important as most UI elements aren't right at the edge anyways. The waviness in some of the tests suggests that the sensors or algorithms may be biased into vertical/horizontal motions (makes sense from a gesturing point of view).
If they really wanted to test how well the touchscreen reacts to hitting links and stuff, I don't see why they just don't go test that. Load up the same sites and keep track of how well it reacts to you hitting links. At the very least, if they wanted to do the drawing program test, it would make more sense to test what happens when you try to hit points, instead of drawing lines. So you could put some magic marker dots on the screen, and have the user hit them and look for the overlap or something.
All in all... shows off some interesting stuff. Suggests some interesting things about the behavior of the different touchscreens, but really not all too conclusive, and really points to further testing/refinement of procedure.
Is it fair to compare the third generation of a product to new products out there right away ?
Fairess isn't an issue. Consumers are presented with various options today. They need to compare them today. We don't have to be worried about hurting the poor phones' (or manufacturers') feelings with the unfairness of it all.
I have a Droid and I just tried drawing diagonals in a paint program on the phone. Yes, I did get the waviness. All that means, though, is that the Droid is not a good choice for a phone if you want to draw on it. I am still able to use the on-screen keyboard just fine and even in a web browser I never have problems tapping a link no matter how far I am zoomed out. This is definitely not a deal-breaker for me. That said, the only reason why I have a Droid is because of the physical keyboard and a pretty decent free ssh client. The kids draw on it but they couldn't care less how straight the lines are or not.
it is fair to compare products available now that represent the best and brightest of what I can buy with my money.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
A thicker line would exacerbate wave effects.
I would guess that the 1st gen was/is just as accurate as the 3rd gen.
But you can build your straw man. They are easier to tear down that way.
http://p8ste.com - Web based Clipboard
but they left it out. I'm looking to move to verizon just to get one once the new pre++ or w/e comes out later this month.
This is obviously a non-issue. Just wiggle your finger a bit to draw straight lines.
What effect does the fact that the iPhone has a vastly lower resolution screen play in this accuracy "test"? Seems it would make it easier to be more accurate.
There is a ton of code in both the Iphone OS and the browser to improve click "quality" of links and buttons and stuff in the product.
They do this, because this is NOT a stylus product, but a product used with fingers. There is even code, that takes account of the consistent errors that YOU, the registered user, make.
They may or may not do this in android.
But at the end of the day, this is not anywhere near the test, nor the conclusions you should be drawing from the test.
Is whether other flavors of applications do their own "cheating" to compensate for this.
In the classic desktop keyboard/mouse arrangement, it is more or less taken for granted that the user will be able to accurately press any button, and put the mouse within a couple pixels of any target(with the exception of somewhat disabled users).
Phones with hard buttons and resistive/stylus touch screens more or less closely approximate this.
Capacitive screens, by contrast, are better for finger work; but rather less precise. This creates a strong incentive to write the software to be as silently forgiving of certain errors as possible. Drawing programs are hard, since there is basically no way(short of an artistic AI) to infer the user's desire. You pretty much have to make do with the best your screen can give you. With a web browser, say, you can fairly strongly assume that users are intersted in clicking on links, rather than just jabbing at inert text, and expand the link target area appropriately. Same thing with all the tricks that touchscreen keyboards use, silently expanding target areas in order to augment accuracy.
It is definitely useful to know how good the raw input is, and more accurate is of course better; but in a class of devices defined by fairly inaccurate input devices, the real question is how good the software's intepretation of the input will be.
It seems to me that diagonal lines aren't that bad of a test actually. Just hitting links doesn't seem as good of a test, because the line test is more generalized. FTA:
Instead, the lines look jagged or zig-zag, no matter how slowly you go, because the sensor size is too big, the touch-sampling rate is too low, and/or the algorithms that convert gestures into images are too non-linear to faithfully represent user inputs.
From this, it looks like the line test actually does a good job of determining how accurate the touch screen is going to be overall.
You can still say the person drawing the lines is inconsistent, but I'd say that's not a big deal, considering it's just an online article.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
A more accurate way of testing this would be to use an x-y positioning device and test hitting specific areas of the screen and report back the x-y coordinates that were hit. Repeat over a few thousand points. Test for line drawing; view with optical scanner. Repeat test for equivalent of 3 years usage.
This would give you a valid measure of the accuracy of the screen decection and it's longevity. On wait a minute, the iPhone can't use a mechanical device but relies on the capacitance of the pointing device. Guess you'd need to build something fancier.
What ever happened to solid scientific testing?
If you spent five minutes looking at this outfit's methodology you'd realize that the test is sound, though perhaps a little exacting compared to real-world use cases. But what I love is that the first twenty posts or so basically all offered apologies for the Android phones and denigrated the significance of the test. They couldn't be better PR responses if Google and Motorola had drafted them. If you happen to use and like an Android device, why don't you just admit that it has a flaw and deal with it? God knows it probably isn't going to affect you under most usual circumstances.
I can't tell you for how long I was and still am pissed off about various missing features on the iPhone (auto-SMS, copy/paste, etc.) but I still like the device overall and use it. You don't have to hold this borderline view of the world in which computing devices are either God's work on Earth or Satan's playthings.
Let's see... Apple developed the Newton and has offered handwriting and gesture recognition built into OS X for many years now. Ya think that maybe Apple figured from previous experience that accurate tracking might be important in the case of the iPhone's touch screen, seeing how it's integral to the interface API, and made the effort to be sure it was done properly from the start?
As fot the Future Generations... The test is for what's current, not the next generation. Obligatory car analogy: if you're buying a car this week, next year's model isn't going to play much of a role in deciding what you buy.
"While it's not likely that a smart phone user is going to draw a lot of lines, the test does give some indication of which phones are most likely to properly respond to clicking on a link in a Web browser." I don't suppose they considered instead testing which phones properly respond to clicking on links in Web browsers?
just rephrase to 'iphone touchscreen using macosx' is more accurate than 'droid touchscreen using android 2.1' happy uh? maybe they can fix it, maybe they can't, its just the current state. the iphone is actually a pretty good device.
This test is the result of the combined hardware-software system that results, at the end of the chain, in the API providing the app with a position. This is what the test ought to show. It doesn't matter if Apple's hardware or software takes the credit for the improved positional accuracy since the end result is what counts. What it does mean is that if the benefits stem from the post-touch processing in software, Android ought to be able to make the required changes to improve things. Until then, though, this is a test of how things currently stand (for what it's worth ... I agree that there could be different algorithms at play for resolving distinct touches or identifying the targets of those touches compared with line-drawing accuracy).
Maybe they're letting us know that it requires more precision...
My
I know my MyTouch 3G also has poor detection along the edges... hitting the keys on the far left or right of the virtual keyboard is much harder than those in the center. That's one application where there are UI elements right at the edge.
Much like the FPS discussion in video games from last week, there comes a point where being super-extra-accurate doesn't matter, and this is one of them.
I would make a web page with many links placed close together. Have the same user try clicking the links in a certain order on both devices and record the accuracy. Repeat with multiple users.
BTW I am a Droid owner who has also used iPhone. I've made mistakes "clicking" on both devices but admittedly probably more on the droid. But the fact that the display looks so much better on the droid makes up for the occasional misclick.
I haven't yet seen anybody else make the following observation so I wonder if it's just my phone, but the audio level that comes out of the Nexus is noticeably lower than what comes out of the Iphone. I can turn the volume on the thing all the way up and it is still very weak in comparison. This applies to both ring tones and multimedia audio. This is more likely to be a hardware issue so I will not hold my breath waiting for a fix.
I have a Droid Eris, and as a guy with bigger hands that usually has trouble with these kinds of devices, I have to say I'm very happy with the accuracy - I almost never make a mis-click, even typing quite fast on the touchscreen keyboard.
However, I'm disappointed in responsiveness. The interface reminds me of playing an online game on a shitty internet connection when your roommate is loading a new YouTube video ever few minutes - without warning, for no apparent reason, and rarely in doing the same action twice, a click / tap will take up to 2 or 3 seconds to register. It's accurate, sure, but that's meaningless when I can't tell whether the thing is froze up or it just didn't detect my click, and don't dare click again for fear of accidentally clicking whatever happens to be in that same spot on the next page if the first click did register.
Unpleasantries.
Software >> hardware.
I have a Droid. The browser always seems to click the wrong link - usually too low. The Android keyboard was marginal. The HTC keyboard was better. Swype is perfect. Most of the other apps are pretty accurate. I downloaded a drawing app and got nice straight lines. Given the amount of effort Apple put into the iPhone OS, it's not surprising that they have a better UI. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the curvature at the edges of the iPhone screen is an intentional effect given the shape that fingers assume when they get to the edge of the screen.
If they wanted to test the accuracy of clicking links in a webpage, wouldn't they have tested it by clicking links in a webpage?
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Because drawing programs are the 'killer ap' for smart phones.
Yes! The Ion/MyTouch has terrible response at the edges. Hitting "P" or "Del" is very difficult.
I don't have a droid so I can't confirm, but this flickr user seems to have replicated the test on the Droid with far different results:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42580856@N08/4264037413/
Was the program written to the same quality in all platforms?
It's a DRAWING PROGRAM.
As in, they take in whatever pixel input the system gives them and spit them out on the screen. "Quality" does not enter into it, because they are all using the same API's that just have the OS feed them a stream of points.
It's representative of the quality of touch accuracy you will have in other apps because they, too, will just look at what points the OS is presenting the user as having touched.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The legitimacy or how real world it applies aside, I'm disappointed with Motorola on this one. The Droid is an expensive device from a brand name manufacturer made in 2009. I expect a level of build quality, feature set, and accuracy. For a capacitance touch screen released in 2009, I would expect a level of accuracy that's at least comparable to the last generation of the iPhone, not accuracy that's poorer than a first gen iPhone.
Coming from resistive touchscreens on Windows Mobile and Palm devices and the device in general, I am overall pretty happy with my Droid. I do have inaccuracies from time to time, but it's ok. Using the onscreen keyboard has been pretty accurate; most of my errors I have attributed to my finger being in the wrong place. Sadly, this is another weapon for the annoying Apple fanboy; pissing contests are annoying and the constant Apple fanboy counter argument of being about to talk and do data at the same time is getting really old and doesn't apply to how I generally use the device.
iPod users have bigger dicks than Android users.
IPod users have smaller breasts than Android but only the male ones.
But... the future refused to change.
First off, I have both a Droid and a 32GB iPod Touch. Frankly, I like the touch on the Droid better than the iPod - I find it more responsive and more accurate when playing the same game or browsing the web on both devices. It may just be my perception, but I simply find myself becoming less aggravated with the Droid's touch screen than the iPod's.
While I don't have the iPod with me right now, I do have my Droid and was able to try this experiment. I used an app called 'Simply Draw' and was not able to repeat their results. Every time I try, I get lines that are as straight as my finger can make them. I have yet to produce lines like those in the article no matter how hard I try - even using multi-touch to draw 2 lines at once works perfectly.
One problem I have noticed with the Droid that may be the cause here is the touchscreen is very sensitive to noisy power supplies. Using a cheap wall charger has a HUGE impact on the accuracy of the touch screen. I'm guessing Motorola didn't use any ferrites on the USB signals, allowing high frequency noise from an external supply to negatively impact the device. I suspect placing a ferrite on the USB cable near the phone end would minimize this issue, but have yet to try it myself. Instead, I just use quality chargers.
[disclamer: i'm working in touch-screen business but not for apple/cellphone company]
This test is biased as:
- user perfomed, we use robot for this kind of qualification (but you can still get an overview if you use jigs)
- strait lines are not the best to see if some king of trajectory filtering is done by the OS: use curve lines, or corners (to see over/undershoot)
- to check if the border effect will affect the point perfomance, touch the screen at regularly spaced points (use a transparent plastic with dots printed on it)
- it would be interesting to get the raw data sent from the touch sensor to check sampling rate & multi touch tracking (and thus removing, the OS and software filtering)
That said, when you are in front of a new touch sensor, the strait lines test on the border is a 'universal' benchmark performed by everyone in the field...
If you up the accuracy of an input device in time and space, you end up with jaggies, because your finger/mouse/etc didn't smoothly travel over the surface.
Drawing software compensates for this by "smoothing" out arcs, and not paying attention to every location the input device feeds them. It guesses that you really didn't mean (1,1), (1,2), (2,2), but rather meant (1,1), (2,2), with the (1,2) being an artefact of sampling at a rate higher than the user's intentions.
In short, a complete lack of waviness makes me doubt that the interface is actually displaying what the finger did. Even the breaks in the line might happen because the user actually did lift their finger up when crossing the screen. The pad can "lie" and pretend "that wasn't really leaving the screen", or "they didn't intend to be all wavey".
As an amusing side effect, the inability to have bracketing points to interpolate around would cause the points near the 'end' of the arc to act strangely... which is exactly what the apple iPhone images do.
My theory that it isn't as much the quality of the touch screen, as it is the higher degree of post-processing going on. This might be in the iPhone software, or in the software of the application in question.
I basically like my Droid, but it's not without numerable faults.
The touchscreen isn't great (even forgiving that it doesn't do multi-touch like iPod/iPhone). When you're browsing a regular web page (something the Droid is up to, with its nice screen and good browser), sometimes the links are just too close to resolve the difference between them. Lots of frustrating touch...back...touch...back action going on.
Yes, it's fair to compare a 2009 product to a 2009 product.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I was able to load Android on the free xv6900 I got from Verizon. It's definitely less of a pain to use than WM6, but I don't have a data plan so I can't really use many of the features.
For the n-th time, your phone wasn't free. I'm able to get a "free" iPhone in that vein if I really want to.
One that hath name thou can not otter
mod parent up.
the droid has more CPU, but the lines were laging behind. I bet the app he used was not as 'native' as the other phone's (maybe a test showing the drag of a icon, see if it jitters)
And since he used different stock aplications there's no way to know if they were tweaked to draw better curves and hence did that crap.
It's a DRAWING PROGRAM ... a stream of points.
and you're so sure it doesn't apply interpolation and smoothing algorithms of various sophistication because?..
All that means, though, is that the Droid is not a good choice for a phone if you want to draw on it. I am still able to use the on-screen keyboard just fine and even in a web browser I never have problems tapping a link no matter how far I am zoomed out. This is definitely not a deal-breaker for me
So, in other words, you've figured out which features are important to you, which are less important to you, and a lack in a feature that isn't important to you.... doesn't make the product worth less over to you.
That's a pretty smart point of view.
Might even be why you're the kind of person who owns a Droid, unlike those stupid iPhone sheeple blinded by Apple's shiny marketing into buying a phone that has a locked-down app store and no tethering or hardware keyboard.
Tweet, tweet.
I'm not so concerned if it's slightly less accurate than the iphone. I'm more interested in whether one can use it with a stylus or gloved hands.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
so different from Windows tablets by the time we got to the Newton 2000/2100. The digitizer was very high resolution (200dpi IIRC), which allowed for very high accuracy in handwriting recognition. Windows never came close.
Yes, I'm aware that the technology was a bit weak at the Newton 100 stage, but half a decade later I was taking all of my university notes on a Newton 2100, with handwriting recognition as fast as I could write, with zero mistakes, including punctuation, which Windows recognition also never got right. I still have the Newton 2100 and it still blows the handwriting recognition of everything else (including XP tablet and Phatware's offering) out of the water.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
here saying I'd never use a touchscreen. Too inaccurate. I poo-poo'ed the iPhone when it was released and swore up and down I'd never leave Palm. Then, at an AT&T store I tried out an iPhone on a lark and I was blown away. I had an upgrade so I went to the iPhone immediately. I've had a chance to test a couple friends' Android phones since, and there's just no comparison.
The iPhone interface is absolutely transparent; it feels like "real world" physics is at work, not like you're using a user interface. The same suspension of disbelief can't happen on Android because the UI just gets it wrong or lags behind you motions way too often.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
There are cheap android phones out there. The T-Mobile Pulse is available in Europe for free with a contract.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I have the droid and the touchscreen was awesome until I put their surprisingly thick screen protector on. Sensitivity is much worse and sometimes it feels like there are "dead" spots on the screen. I'd prefer a thinner DS style screen protector.
Let me see if I have this right...
A company that strives to make high quality well-thought out expensive hardware has made high quality hardware.
Think what you will about apple, but the GUI and user experience has always been their strong suit and it shows in the subtleties of the iPhone.
Sheldon
Only fair, since that's what the Droid guys did in their "Droid does" campaign.
Subsidized prices are meaningless. iPhone 3GS is available in T-Mobile in Europe for free with a contract.
http://www.era.pl/pl/biznes/taryfy/iphone3gs/taryfy
http://www.era.pl/pl/indywidualni/taryfy/abonament/iphone3gs
("Era" is the name of T-Mobile at my place; first link is an offer for companies that should go through automatic translation easily; the second for individual customers is in Flash; but the offers are practically identical)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Not sure why you were modded right down. Well, I am sure of course - you criticised Apple.
TFA starts "The success of the iPhone" - what success is that? Okay success, but let's not forget who are still 40% of the market (Nokia). But as you say, the article conveniently ignores them. TFA continues:
"has triggered the adoption of touchscreen systems in a wide range of mobile devices"
Yeah right. No one would want touchscreens, unless Apple produced one with a whopping few per cent of the market(!) I keep rereading that sentence, and I fail to see how it has any grasp in reality.
Yet another article engulfed by the RDF - can we have some unbiased reports instead?
FYI, it helps (at least for me) if you hold your thumb at a slightly more vertical angle when trying to hit those keys.
I don't think it's meaningless at all. At least in the US people who can't afford expensive phones almost exclusively get subsidized ones. And the subsidized plan it comes with is only about $50 a month which is a relatively affordable plan. Unfortunately it's not available in the US yet.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
These virtual keyboards are for thin-fingered meth addicts.
Why are you so fucking stupid?