Touch Screens in the Age of Dinosaurs: Moto Development Labs’ Touch Screen Test

Touch technology as a hype word is often automatically assigned to the iPhone in people's minds, usually because of the use "touch" in so many of the marketing titles.  This is by no means standard as almost every leading smart phone is heading in this direction and assigning the versatility of touch screens to their mechanism instead of the restrictive nature of a separation between the viewable area and the keyboard.  The need for this is standard now that our smart phones have become multimedia and gaming hubs and the ability to extend the screen as much as possible when not using any type of button mechanism is crucial.  The iPhone has continued to be a leader in this field yet with the massive release of competitive phones such as the Nexus One and the Droid. 

The assumption of smart phone superiority has slipped from the iPhone as it does not hold a monopoly on this cutting edge technology, but how well has this touch technology been used in each model?  The MOTO Development Lab, which is part of the MOTO Development Group that provides technology development for a variety of companies, has structured a model for testing the effectiveness of their touch screen incarnations.

The test that MOTO Development Lab has come up with uses a drawing software to test the responsiveness and speed of the touch screen as contact with it results in the marks read by the software.  As is often used in iPhone art applications the MOTO Development Lab test asks the user to draw with their finger on the touch screen to test how effective the screen is.  How well those lines are received, especially in their fluidity in response to finger movement, will help you decode how proper the touch screen is.  The test itself also really focused on how responsive the the touch screen's were to different pressures that were applied and if the edge of the screens were equally responsive as the center locations.

Over all this process was meant to give a hierarchy of these phones to see which ones continue to be on top.  Motorola's fabled Droid was at the far bottom of the list as it created very jagged responses to fluid motions against the touch screen.  The Nexus One rested in the middle as a fairly solid choice for those with compatible cell phone service.  As many have expected, the iPhone 3Gs stood above all others and has validated the technology once again, and it will maintain its position as the best touch screen phone.

It is going to take a re-conception of the touch screen technology for competing companies to really challenge the technological dominance of Apple's iPhone.  MOTO Development Lab did not have a clear answer as to what the technological difference were that resulted in the difference, but it can range between the depth of sensors to the calculations made by the device internally.  They do recommend for more development to take place, especially in the development of proper algorithms to power the device.  With this they state that hardware and software development have to occur together instead of as separate items.