The screen on the Nexus One has been an area of focus for reviews and comparisons ever since it’s launch just a couple short months ago. The 3.7″ diagonal 480×800 pixel AMLOED screen has received a number of good reviews and a number of bad ones. The reviews range everywhere from personal opinion, to rigorous touch and display testing. Well, add one more test to the list, the multi-touch function testing. Initial takes on the screen seemed to indicate it was a beautiful screen with vivid colors, though maybe too vivid at times. Now there is a detailed report on the display’s ability to render smooth gradients and overall color accuracy. Others focused less on the output and more on the input with the touch sensitivity test from Moto.com, which has more to do with the touch input hardware than the display hardware, but it’s all built into the same touch screen. There it was shown that all the Android phones had a stair step effect when trying to trace diagonal lines across the touch screens. Well, now that multi-touch has been enabled on the Nexus One, it was time to take the testing one step further. With a custom built application specifically to test the performance of the multi-touch on Android phones, an Android developing company ,Battery Powered Games, took the time to compare the Droid and the Nexus One and the results were not good for the Nexus One. Tracking on the Droid was fairly good and responsive, whereas on the Nexus One, it was lacking and at one point completely off. Check out the video for the details:
The story was broken by AndroidandMe and in their story they refference a Google employee who didn’t really state what the problem could be, but did comment that there is different hardware in the Nexus One than in the Droid. Well, that doesn’t really help determine what the problem is, but I have been reading some of the responses and about half state it’s hardware the other half software. I’m hoping for the later. Of course, it will be interesting to see the results of the test when Android 2.1 is in place with the HTC Hero.
UPDATE: I installed the Multitouch Test app on my HTC Hero running Android 2.1 (custom ROM) and I found it has the same issues as the Nexus One. I can easily fool the multitouch into swapping and actually tracking in the wrong corners just like the above video.
