Droid Touchscreen Less Accurate Than iPhone's 198
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."
Re:Obviously... (Score:1, Informative)
So, restricted to capacitive screens (Score:4, Informative)
No mention of the N900.
Drawn on N900. LOL...I cringe at how bad this looks (though it is unfinished) [mynokiablog.com]
Re:What generation of Iphone is being compared her (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Not sure why this is supposed to be a problem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Well of course drawing lines is important (Score:3, Informative)
nah cause an iPhone would auto correct that, i tried it on mine.. So, to summarise, fail.
Re:Resolution? (Score:4, Informative)
No effect. First, the touchscreen resolution differs from the display resolution. Second, these tests are showing results at the image level, from a distance away. We're not talking about, say, the Droid displaying wiggles on the order of 1-2 pixels. The wiggles subsume a large number of pixels. Further, even though the iPhone has a lower-resolution screen, it makes excellent use of antialiasing. You can observe position changes that, on average, are less than the pixel pitch with such methods.
Re:Mechanical versus human testing... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Obviously... (Score:5, Informative)
It reflects resolution, and shows 'dead spots' in the touch surface that the OS/Software must 'guess' as to approximate location. Granted it's not a very scientific test, but it does show some interesting weaknesses in the varous implementations. For instance, on an iPhone, you can click on a link that is only a few pixels in height and be relatively sure you'll get the correct link out of a list of links.
If you'll think back to the days of low resolution, when you were trying to fit a decent image into a 16x16 icon representation, you get an idea of what this may be showing. If the touch capacitance screen doesn't have a grid address for a specific spot you're trying to touch, it will have to guess between the two nearest points.
This is very similar to mouse resolution.
A more valid test would be to use a 'robotic' finger that could apply exact pressure across all phones, but it does give a decent general idea as to how they stack up.
Re:Obviously... (Score:5, Informative)
...The Droid is not as good as the iPhone if you are buying it to use as a graphics tablet, but c'mon, who does that?...
This guy. [jorgecolombo.com] (Left 15 images... one of them was actually a New Yorker cover.)
Re:Their conclusion is illogical. (Score:4, Informative)
Their conclusion is perfectly logical: they have Yahoo Research listed as one of their "collaborators", and are apparently selling a system of their own [moto.com] which is Android-based but (in their opinion) better than the standard Android.
Re:So, restricted to capacitive screens (Score:4, Informative)
Failed car analogy, no cookie for you!
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lamborghini_tractors.jpg [wikimedia.org]
Re:Not sure why this is supposed to be a problem (Score:5, Informative)
Do you happen to have any links illustrating the ssh client you mentioned? Sounds interesting.
Sure thing: http://code.google.com/p/connectbot/ [google.com]
A Little Disappointing (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Obviously... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Obviously... (Score:5, Informative)
Then you haven't used the iPhone. I click on single character links regularlly. Normally page numbers or the next arrow for images. It is another ui design by apple. It goes to the closet link within so many pixels.
The droid I got to play with one day had hard enough time registering the unlock slide let alone clicking on page numbers. I will say however it displayed ars techincas mobile sitebetter than my iPhone. The droid didn't fix the damn font height but left it scalable. Along with not having to jailbreak to install myown apps are two big pluses. But at the end of the day the UI is more important than any other app. Good apps can't fix a bad ui. However a decent UI can make limited apps more usable.
The test is biased (Score:4, Informative)
[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...
Re:Different results from this guy (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Couldn't repeat (Score:2, Informative)
I could repeat the results provided in the article, but I noticed that how 'sweaty' or 'oily' your finger is effects the results, as well as how fast you move your finger.
If I move my finger lethargically slow it gets more wiggles. If I zip my finger across the screen, the lines are nearly perfectly straight, every single time. It seems to show that the Droid tends to have different algos for their autocorrection. Maybe they have more corrections a second going on than the iphone. No idea. Hard to tell without ripping the logic of both the drivers to see how it does autocorrection. But I think this may be more a software/driver issue than hardware.
It seems the results are baked entirely on how you happen to test it, just like any other statistic, it should be taken with a grain of salt.
Re:Obviously... (Score:3, Informative)
I continuously tap links as small as 3 or 4px on my iPhone and it works well enough that I rarely bother zooming in on the page before taping the link.
My finger maybe 40px on a screen that high res, but it knows exactly where my finger is and can pinpoint the center of my finger to a single pixel with good accuracy. If you watch the video you'll see that the nexus one can only do this when you press firmly (which i rarely do on my iPhone). While the droid is, as the slashdot story says, never accurate and insanely inaccurate when you don't press firmly. The iPhone is always accurate except at the edge of the screen.
This stuff is critical! Even just typing in on a touch screen keyboard needs good accuracy, because the keys are about half the size of your finger. And it needs accuracy when you lightly tap the keys, because you won't bother pressing firmly while typing a quick text message or email and you will be pissed off when there are continuous typo's. The end result is, without a good touch screen, you won't use your phone as often as you could be.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Couldn't repeat (Score:3, Informative)
The screen will be sampled ever so often, and if you move your finger quickly the samples will be far less, resulting in a straight line between them.
You can check this by drawing very quick circles on the device, you will notice it is composed of straight lines rather than a perfect curve. The effect will get worse the faster you draw the circles.