Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
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.
Your message didn't happen to be typed on said iPhone, did 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.
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.
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.
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.
nah cause an iPhone would auto correct that, i tried it on mine.. So, to summarise, fail.
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
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.
"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?
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
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).
Keep in mind, when you touch a touchscreen with your finger, the contact point is not where you think you're touching.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Actually, cap screens work with any conductor. I mean, hell, a hot dog works on a iPhone. You could use that in your mechanical device. Though a giant metal probe would also work. But the hot dog is more fun, and probably gives better results... a lot more like a finger.
A "hot dog", huh? Sure...
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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...
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...
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