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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."
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
"These aren't the results I wanted to see, therefore the methodology is flawed!"
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
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.
Precisely. Maybe the Nexus One is vastly superior at tracing circles. Neither of these results would say anything whatsoever about how the phone actually performs in click detection.
It doesn't matter if a finger isn't "precise" enough. The purpose of the testing is to determine real life performance. So you should be testing with something as precise as you would use in real life. What does it matter if a phone can detect the exact position of a pen point, when it goes nuts trying to find the center of your fingertip. What matters is consistency. In that case, the methodology is wrong. A single human isn't not consistent enough, even over the number of repetitions shown.
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.
The point is resistive screens do "accuracy", capacitive screens do "responsive" and "multi touch".
They're testing screens for accuracy and they only look at machines with capacitative screens.
The iPhone has multi-touch, it beats the pants of the N900 for "responsiveness", but it's nowhere near as accurate.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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
That would be very true if touchscreens were purely a point-and-click (or aim-and-stab) input control. However, what Apple has tried to do with the iPhone (and the recent "Magic Mouse" is indicative of this trend) is to create a new human-device interface mechanism that depends more on natural and intuitive gestures than aiming and stabbing a specific screen area. Because of this, the ability to track finger movements consistently and accurately is very important.
If, on the other hand, your user interface depends on a literal translation of a desktop point-and-click GUI, designed to be used primarily with a mouse and keyboard, to a touchscreen input control; then, of course, consistent and accurate tracking is less important than detecting the precise region where pressure was applied at a specific time. But if that is the case, the problems are deeper than just accuracy.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
As a Droid user, I think I can answer this.
In order to unlock the screen, you can use a gesture to unlock it. About 75% of the time, it works fine but the remainder of the time the gesture is not recorded correctly. There's a few games (word search) that often have issues marking an entire word.
Only owning an iPod Touch, it's hard for me to do a side-by-side comparison since I don't do the same things with the droid as I do the touch. All that aside, I love the Droid.
I'm also a Droid user. I rarely have issues with the lock screen. The impression I've had is those times that I do, it's because I was trying to do some one-handed thumb swipe or slashing at the screen. I'll have to pay closer attention but I would have a hard time at this point thinking that this test has much practical application to my experience. Of course, I also do not use an iPhone or other Android phone so I have nothing to compare to.
I do, however, miss the curved unlock widget. I prefer it over the newer, current linear one.
The Android keyboard was marginal. The HTC keyboard was better.
And yet, they are both infinitly better than the iPhone's keyboard.
Sorry, I am feeling snarky this morning...