iPhone wins touchscreen test against Android

On 01.12.10, In iPhone, by Rehman

touchscreen

It is fairly difficult to do head-to-head tests between smartphones in a really scientific way, in most cases, but we can now be assured that the iPhone has the most accurate touchscreen in the land.

Trying to do a smartphone-to-smartphone competition quickly turns out to be an apples against googles, uh, I mean oranges, situation. Smartphones are at once so similar and so different that scientific comparisons break down quickly. People like one smartphone more than another based more on the total experience provided, rather than on individual features, which are often quite similar given their similar goals.

Therefore, it is at least semi-refreshing to see that at least one scientific test that can be fairly easily performed and that there is a clear winner. According to a PCWorld story, the Moto Development Group has tested the touchscreen accuracy of four leading smartphones, Nexus One, Motorola Droid, HTC Droid Eris, and the Apple iPhone 3GS. In this test, the iPhone was the winner. This is important, according to Moto, because “When a manufacturer gets it right, the device tracks touch inputs almost as if they were connected to physical objects in the real world. Get it wrong and consumers end up with inferior touchscreen systems that are inaccurate, insensitive, and absolutely infuriating to use for typing.”

As nice as it is to see a test like this, and we hope that we will see many more, in isolation they mean very little. The only test that really matters is how the phones perform in the marketplace and that is a much more complicated matter than that of touchscreen accuracy, though the latter is a part of the former. From early indications, the Google Android phone seems to be the first new phone in quite a while to have most of the right factors to succeed in a big way in the marketplace. Still, they are going to have a long uphill struggle against the iPhone, the favorite of consumers and the Blackberry, still the darling of the corporate world.