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."
Used "a program" ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
As a G1 user... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
What's important (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
palm pre has a capacitive screen (Score:2, Interesting)
Resolution? (Score:5, Interesting)
What would be intersesting to know... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Obviously... (Score:2, Interesting)
But what does this really mean? 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? I am able to use the web browser, keyboard, etc. with absolutely no problem. It seems to me that this article is just here to try to get publicity for the person who wrote it and the person that I will not name.
Re:Well of course drawing lines is important (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not sure why this is supposed to be a problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Eh, I have a Droid and I hate the physical keyboard. The keys are just too tiny - the on-screen keyboard keys are actually easier to hit.
I have an iPod Touch, too, and I'd agree that the iPod's screen is better. Just in terms of overall feel - the droid is actually more accurate when using the on-screen keyboard, but it's way too eager to click instead of scroll, meaning that when you're paging around through your contacts you'll accidentally dial people, and when dragging around inside of the browser, you'll accidentally follow links, etc.
It's annoying, but I like the Droid anyway.
Re:Mechanical versus human testing... (Score:4, Interesting)
My observations of my new Nexus Phone (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Droid Eris User (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Different results from this guy (Score:3, Interesting)
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/ [flickr.com]
Couldn't repeat (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Higher accuracy causes jaggies (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ah, groupthink (Score:1, Interesting)
The iphone fanboys vastly outnumber the 'droid ones, so had the results been the opposite, we'd have a flurry of posts claiming that the test was bullshit instead.
I wouldn't be able to disagree with them too strongly either, I don't think dragging your finger across the screen in a drawing app produces an accurate representation of the overall accuracy or quality of the screen, or the real world implications besides those of drawing diagonal lines.
-mobby_6kl
Re:Obviously... (Score:3, Interesting)
And don't forget typing on the virtual keyboard. On my Nexus One, I find the keyboard is easily a match for my wife's iPhone 3Gs, but I do notice I have to apply more pressure than is natural to click on the small virtual buttons along the bottom of my Nexus One. Only a problem until you get use to it.
Overall, the most important app isn't the UI, but how good is it as a phone. My wife envy's my ability to recieve calls in low-points along the streets in our neighborhood. Next time I go to Europe, I'll just drop in a Vodafone SIM card, and avoid insane roaming charges. The Nexus One on T-Mobile is a better phone than the iPhone on AT&T. On Verizon, it will be even better. As a handheld computer, the hardware is a bit better on the Nexus One, while the iPhone has a slight edge in the UI, and a large advantage in apps. The Nexus One is also less evil in several ways (restrictions on apps in the store, ability to remove apps you've paid for, lock-in to iTunes and the whole DRM mess, closed-source, no unlocked SIM cards, force you to pay for ringtones, no VoIP...)
Overall, I'm glad I've got the Nexus One, and my wife is glad to have her iPhone 3Gs. For those who require keyboards, the Droid is the best thing out there. It seems the iPhone has some real competition. Finally.
So, why does it take companies who aren't cell-phone manufacturers to design great ones?
Re:Ah, groupthink (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ah, groupthink (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
Re:Obviously... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Ah, groupthink (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Couldn't repeat (Score:1, Interesting)
It might help to keep in mind that it's "The Unofficial Apple Weblog" doing this experiment.
"Astroturfers" or "fanbois" comes to my mind immediately. Were it coming from a unbiased source, I might give a shit what they say. As is, I ain't buyin it.
Re:Well of course drawing lines is important (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, the autocorrect feature of the iPhone wouldn't work too well if you're dumb like me and you press the little X when it tries to correct you. I do this quite often, thinking that this is how to ACCEPT the alternative word, rather then ignoring it.
haha
Oh, I'm the anonymous poster with the fat fingers.
Same. I used to be one of the people that posted (Score:4, Interesting)
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.