The Google Nexus One is no good at multi-touch...

The honeymoon period for the Google Nexus One appears to be well and truly over. Last week we wrote about some apparent problems with the Android smartphone’s ‘PenTile’ display and while those issues are open to debate, this latest complaint seems more clear-cut.

The problem this time is with the Nexus One’s multi-touch sensor and it came to light when developer Robert Green was having problems with the sensor on his device. He decided to knock up an app to test the touch-screen more fully and the result is ‘Multitouch Visible Test’.

The app detects up to two points of contact and attempts to track their movement on the screen — something that multi-touch displays do for pinch zooming, for example (a feature only recently enabled on the Nexus One). Some simple visual feedback shows how accurate the tracking is and, well, that’s it — the app couldn’t be much simpler.

On the Motorola Droid / Milestone, the app works as expected and two points of contact are tracked accurately all over the screen. On the Nexus One, however, two-point tracking falls apart as soon as the two points of contact get close together and the points often get swapped over — which makes the screen useless for many multi-touch games. This video demo demonstrates the problem very clearly:

The explanation seems to lie with the hardware itself and a Google engineer has confirmed that the Nexus One uses essentially the same screen as the ancient (in smartphone terms) G1 Android smartphone. This means that a fix is unlikely to be forthcoming — so much for the Nexus One being a Google ‘ superphone’, then.

“…this is how the touch screen hardware on the Nexus One works (which is essentially the same screen as on the G1). The Droid has a sensor from a different manufacturer, with different behavior. Other phones will likewise have different sensors. This has nothing to do with the Android platform. Please do not file bugs about it.

Android is just reporting what the hardware is capable of reporting. There is no ‘normalization’ for games or such, there is just the data the screen provides."

The Multitouch Visible Test app is available as a free download in the Android market, so you can test it for yourself — let us know in the comments how your Android smartphone fares.

[via Android and Me]