Smartphone touchscreen test repeated with a robot finger — iPhone still on top

Remember that smartphone touchscreen test we wrote about a few months ago? The one where someone drew diagonal lines to test touch sensor accuracy and the iPhone came out on top — and the Nexus One wasn’t quite so hot..? Well complaints about the validity of the test have led Moto Labs to do it again, this time with a robot finger.

The first test relied upon someone tracing their finger across the screens of a number of leading smartphones to see how good the capacitive sensors were at accurate tracking. Straight lines were a sign of good tracking, wobbly lines meant poor tracking, but questions about how accurate the person at the other end of the finger was at drawing straight lines did put a question mark under the results.

So, to eliminate human error, Moto Labs has repeated the test using a robot ‘finger’ capable of drawing perfectly straight lines, thus removing any margin oh input error. The Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm 2 were also added to the smartphone line-up.

And the result? Well, the iPhone still comes out on top for accuracy in both the medium and light touch tests, with the other smartphones not faring anywhere near as well. The Palm Pre is close second in the medium touch test, but performed miserably in the light touch test, as did the Motorola Droid and BlackBerry Storm 2.

There is still a potential variable in the drawing app used for each smartphone and, as Moto Labs explains, some may apply a degree of smoothing to compensate for finger wobble. It also points out that such smoothing is seldom applied to lines drawn very slowly though, and also posts a lists of the apps used for the tests so that owners can try it for themselves.

[ Moto Labs]