The touch-screen is a key element of most smartphones and tablets today, and the speed with which it responds to users’ touch is a critical part of successful interaction with the device. While stats on screen size and resolution are readily available, judging responsiveness to touch has largely been the realm of reviewer anecdotes and personal perception.
Start-up company Agawi released its first bench-marking report for touch-screen responsiveness last September, followed quickly by an update in October. The company uses a special instrument it calls a “touchscope” to make the measurement, which in its latest report ran from 75 milliseconds for an iPad Mini to 168 milliseconds for the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0.
“Since every few milliseconds of latency reduces the responsiveness of the app being streamed, we have focused on relentlessly identifying, measuring and eliminating latency to make streaming applications to mobile devices as responsive as possible,” Agawi says on its website.
Rohan Relan, CEO and co-founder of Agawi, said that despite the importance of latency, there has been little good data available on the subject.
“There was no good, end-to-end measure of latency from the point that a user touches the screen, to the point that the screen updates and you see the pixels update with the results,” Relan said.
So Agawi put together its TouchMark benchmark and assessed a variety of devices, as well as an Apple iOS vs. Google Android comparisons. It concluded that the “iPhone, with a response time of only 54 milliseconds, is more responsive by a factor of more than [two-times] when compared to Microsoft’s Lumia, Google’s Moto X, Samsung’s Galaxy S4 and other popular smartphones.”
In fact, the company’s tests showed a two-year-old iPhone 4 performed better than the latest phones from other manufacturers. The speed differences in the touch-screens in Apple devices vs. Android probably explains why users feel that an Apple touch-screen keyboard is more responsive than an Android one, Relan speculated when the results were first released.
Although the test information itself is of interest to consumers, device reviewers and original equipment manufacturers, Relan said the testing itself and the subsequent release of that information is an important motivator for the industry.
“When you measure something, people improve it,” Relan said. “Our goal is to get this bench-marking out there, so that people start improving responsiveness and overall, everything becomes more responsive.”
“The guys who spent time to focus on this metric, then make it better, are now being recognized for it to some degree,” he added. “Now there’s a third-party benchmark to show that when you put this effort in and do the work, someone will be out there talking about it.”
