A few days ago, a study from MOTO came out, showing the accuracy of various touchscreen devices, including the Motorola DROID, Apple iPhone, and a few other touchscreen smartphones. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to include any Symbian-powered smartphones in their study, so Dotsisx and I decided to conduct our own similar study.
We gathered as many touchscreen Symbian-powered smartphones as we could, including the Nokia N97 Mini, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia 5530 XpressMusic, Nokia X6, and Samsung i8910 (thanks to Adam at iUnlock.com), to get a nice range of devices from every category. Just like MOTO, we performed the test twice on each device – once with low pressure and the corner of our finger and once with medium pressure and the full finger pad.
NOTE: Of course, this is not a scientific test – however, it should give you a good idea of how our Symbian-powered sweethearts rank among the other touchscreen phones on the market.
For these tests, we simply opened a sketch/drawing application and tried to draw straight, diagonal lines across the display. The best touchscreen will have straight lines, where inferior touchscreens will show the zig-zag ’staircase’ lines that you’ll notice in some of the photos. For the Nokia devices, we used the Mobile Paint application from Forum Nokia. I’m not 100% sure if the absence of lines around the edge of the display is due to the device’s hardware or the paint application, so keep that in mind.
Low-Pressure, Corner Of Finger
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In this view, you can see that the Nokia’s tend to do rather well, while the Samsung seriously struggled with stair-stepping. However, you can also see that the two capacitive displays (Samsung i8910 and Nokia X6) do much better at getting all the way to the edge of the display, while the resistive Nokia’s struggle with a sizable border.
Medium-Pressure, Full Finger Pad
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In this test, with medium pressure and using the full pad of the finger, the Samsung does a bit better, but is still not on par with the Nokia’s, either resistive or capacitive. Again, Nokia’s resistive screens not only lose sensitivity, but also accuracy along the edges, which is where scroll bars and that sort of thing are usually located. However, the Samsung i8910 and Nokia X6 seem to maintain sensitivity out to the edges, though accuracy suffers there, too.
Conclusion
As you can see from these tests, Nokia’s resistive touchscreen devices (N97, 5800 XpressMusic, 5530 XpressMusic) all perform pretty much the same. Lines are straight and smooth with both light and medium pressure, but you quickly lose sensitivity and accuracy along the edges of the screen. The X6, Nokia’s first capacitive touchscreen device, performs slightly better, with sensitivity and accuracy maintained to the edges of the screen. The Samsung i8910, unfortunately, performs rather poorly, indicating that they need to make some improvements in their algorithms and touchscreen technology.
If you have one of these phones or another touchscreen smartphone, you can perform these tests on your own. Watch the video below to see how to properly run the test. In our tests, we gave each test 3 tries and took the best result, so don’t be afraid to ‘practice’ a bit, too.
More Info From MOTO
Here’s a video clip explaining the tests, how to correctly perform them for yourself, and why it’s important to note these differences.
DIY Touchscreen Analysis from MOTO Development Group on Vimeo.
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