It was the success of the iPhone that triggered the adoption of touchscreen by a wide range of mobile devices. A fairly large number of new gadgets that are equipped with capacitive screen technology have flooded the markets world over. Though millions of smartphones of today are using capacitive displays, mostly from suppliers from China, nevertheless, all these touchscreens are neither created the same nor these are equal in their responses. MOTO which has years of experience in developming products that use capacitive touch, carried out an interesting comparison by conducting a simple experiment. For this experiment, all that you need is a basic drawing program using a steady hand, and a few straight lines drawn very slowly on the screen of the phone. Video below demonstrates how the test is done:

In the video, we clearly notice that on a good touchscreen, users can draw clean straight lines, even while going very slow, and the graphics that appear on screen accurately represent what physically was drawn. Conversely, on inferior touchscreens, it’s almost impossible to draw straight lines. The lines look jagged, wavering or zig-zag. No matter how slowly these are drawn, due to the bigger size of sensor, the touch-sampling rate is too low, and/or the algorithms converting gestures into images are too non-linear to represent user inputs.

Touchscreen technology involves creation of that finesse which produce pleasant feelings to its user. Touchscreens require seamless integration between hardware components, software algorithms, and user-interface design. At any stage cutting corners or fumbling up with any of the critical elements by the manufacturer, the user’s experience with a touchscreen product is likely to be irritating. In the screenshot below, iPhone, Droid, Nexus One, and Eris capacitive touch screens have been compared:

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The results clearly favors the iPhone whose response is excellent whereas Motorola’s Droid is doing the worst of the four and HTC’s is somewhat in middle of the road. So once again Apple proves equal to its slogan; ‘Its only iPhone that beats an iPhone’.