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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."
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.
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?
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
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.
This is my biggest problem with my phone (a Moto Krave ZN4). I already had an iPod Touch, so figured "Hey, this touch screen thing is pretty cool. - I'll get one for my phone.". Didn't work out so great. While I can type away just fine on the iPod (I've started leaving my laptop home most of the time now since if I'm near a hotspot my iPod Touch does 98% of what I want to do on a laptop), on the Krave trying to do a text message on the onscreen QWERTY keyboard is just painful. Try to press one key - it registers the one beside it. Try to hit backspace. It registers a letter instead. Finally backspace across the two bad letters. Ok, now CAREFULLY try to press the letter I want. Nope, grabs the key beside it again. Not to mention the contacts list. I've just gotten used to apologizing to people because half the time when I tap a contact to call it calls the person next to them. This was particularly embarrassing when I was trying to call my brother at 4am over Christmas break because he overslept to go duck hunting - it the phone dialed one of the department directors at work which happens to be right next time him. After that I started prefixing all work contacts with #'s just so they'd stay away from my personal contacts on the list.
I'm not buying another touch screen phone now without testing it in person first to make sure it feels right.
PS Yes, I know the obvious answer would be to just get an iPhone but AT&T nor any other GSM carrier gets signal where I live.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
A "hot dog", huh? Sure...
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.
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.
If you spent five minutes looking at this outfit's methodology you'd realize that the test is sound
I spent less than five minutes watching the video and I realized I had been wasting my time, because this "test" is an absolute joke. He isn't balancing his finger against a straight edge, he isn't moving it at a constant rate, and the results in the video don't correspond to the images on the web site.
Before I watched the video, I thought it had some legitimacy, as I got wavy lines when I drew on my Nexus One. But then I tried it with my finger against a pen laid diagonally across the screen, and it produced a perfect straight line, at every speed. The whole article is a fanboy blowing smoke, relying on the twitchy human nervous system.
I think Martin Sheen said it best:
Actually this is more of a problem on sites that don't offer a mobile version.
It can be a problem even for the people building the "mobile" versions of web sites. The iPhone is a special problem, since its default browser likes to format pages for an arbitrary size, then shrink it to (sometimes) fit the screen. The result can easily be text and buttons that are only a few pixels tall. When you "unpinch" to enlarge it, it doesn't get reformatted to fit the screen; it grows to larger than screen size and requires left-right scrolling to read.
I've built a number of "mobile" pages that carfully avoid ever declaring a size for anything, with the idea that this gives the browser total freedom to format it to fit the screen. This works fine on most smartphones, but with the iPhone, it tends to produce font/button sizes that are either huge or tiny, and requiring 2-dimensional scrolling back and forth to read it all. There's a lot of discussion of this in various online forums, but no good solution that I've found. The best is to use a "meta name=viewport" tag to specify the screen width, but this only works for one of the two layouts, and the sending code can't know which layout the phone is using at the moment. Also, it'll break as soon as Apple releases an iPhone with a higher-res screen that's a different width. The basic problem is an old one: The server-side code can't correctly format things for a client's window, because there's no way it can know its size. HTTP could have included a field specifying the client's screen/window size, but that wasn't done. (If it's possible, I've never seen it, and I've seen a lot of HTTP and HTML headers.)
Of course, even better would be for web clients to sensibly reformat for the screen space it has available. (There's even evidence that the folks who designed HTML thought about this. ;-) Many phones' browsers do this, but iPhone's browser doesn't even seem to try. If there's a way to override its default and say "format this for your screen's width", nobody seems to know the magic incantation to make it work.
Funny thing is that my G1 phone reformats automatically when I rotate or resize the screen. So do the couple of other rotatable phones that I've tested. You'd think Apple's devs would know how to do this, too. I wonder why they got it so wrong?
(One theory floating around is that it's intentional, to discourage the use of the iPhone's browser, and encourage people to write iPhone-only apps to do what could be done with a few web pages. I've seen no real evidence for or against this theory.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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