You dont have to explain anything to me. I did the same trip last year using my iphone 4S when i had it in pretty much the same manner. I did it again this year with my Nexus 4 and had no battery issues. This is either a problem with his HTC One's battery or a severely dodgy app.


Ah yes, the put down because i don't agree with you!

I'm perfectly technical. I understand perfectly thanks. My problem here is a primary apple user has an Android phone which he constantly berates apparently kills itself hours and hours before his iphone does apparently doing the same thing. This is also not just using GPS to make that clear.


Yes, i do know this and In fact, i didn't have that on. I refuse to pay the data rates while abroad. So it was pure GPS using offline maps.

Scrolling on what? A web page? So its down to bad coding in the browser mainly Chrome. That does not = the problem being with Android!!

My Nexus 4 doesn't ever lag scrolling if you mean just normal use through the launcher. Its just as fast and smooth as an iphone or windows phone.

So did you use google maps on a nexus 4 with the screen on for 6 straight hours ? with pure GPS active for 6 straight hours ?

A tracking app may need to access the gps more often than google maps. This in no way means it's dodgy.

To be fair although the Nexus 4 will fail on the refresh web page while scrolling up and down, under normal use it's very smooth in general operation.

It's still the cheaper android handsets that are still pretty horrible to use in this respect and yes the tablets do still lag a bit, especially the bigger tabs

I don't disagree with you that Chrome isn't representative of an OS. (Chrome on iOS is pretty lag-free though, and I would have thought Google would want their Android app to be as good as it can be.)

Anyway, I don't just mean Chrome. And I don't really mean lag. It's not easy to explain really, but it's just to do with how the touch inputs are handled a bit differently. When I use my iPhone, the screen seems to respond instantly, like it's glued to my finger's movement. But whenever I've used an Android device, it always seems to be ever so slightly behind the movement of my finger. I remember someone a while ago using pinch to zoom as an example. On the iPhone, you put your fingers on the screen and then as soon as you start to move them, the zoom starts. I think the Nexus 4 was used as an example of you having to move your fingers slightly more for the zoom to start, and so you end up with the mistaken impression that it's not keeping up.

And this is what I mean. I don't think it's anything to do with lag or speed. These top-end Android phones have all the processing power they need and more to spare. Maybe it's by design. But the FEEL of the screen input is a little different. That's not to say it's actually any slower though.

I don't know how else to describe it without having two devices side by side and trying to video what I mean!!

EDIT: I'm not trying to have a dig at Android or anything, by the way. I'm just trying to explain what I mean!

I suspect that some/much of this may be intentional. I always felt it was more a 'floaty' scrolling on some apps - similar to a mouse where moving it a short distance moves the cursor a long way. The Android software/hardware is more than capable of instant responsiveness - try the pattern unlock screen for example. Ive always felt that this screen felt a little 'too' instant strangely ......

On the discussion on lag my old original San Francisco with its old ARM 11 CPU can be a bit laggy.

But was anyone too bothered? No, because at £80 the buyer got a phone with high resolution screen, something missing from the more expensive Galaxy Apollo, Ace, 3GS etc etc.
The simple fact was that the screen that made it more functional.

It will be interesting when someone will put Googles words to the test and creates a KitKat ROM for it. It has got the requisite 512K RAM.

I agree with you - that's why I said 'lag' is probably the wrong word. It's not a case of the phone being too slow to keep up, that's for sure.

It may just be what one is used to. As you know, I use both and on my current trip away probably in equal amounts. Personally I make less mistakes on IOS - though I would love a Swype keyboard please Apple.

I think it was originally me talking about pinch. I have to agree with you, the concept that the response is glued to the fingers movement is just how it feels.

Why does it matter?
When scientific tests don't tally with what you want, you simply dismiss them as being rigged.

I actually came up with a reproducible way of demonstrating how the scrolling in an app works differently from iOS and android and why on older Android devices the lag is very bad, rather than stating something as a fact

As I said in the real world and on top end devices the lag isn't going to be noticeable but there is a difference in the way touch is handled between iOS and android.

The accuracy test just looks flawed and there is no real explanation of how they measured it

Considering they used a robotic finger obviously they used a small app to compare reported co-ordinates versus the actual robot's co-ordinate.

There is no information on how the robotic arm is calibrated. How do we know that is accurate. How do we know how they got the co-ordinates.

In iOS development you normally deal with the non-retina co-ordinates in most cases so for example on an iPhone 5 although the pixel resolution is 1136 x 640, the dip/device-width resolution is 568 x 320 so the normal x,y co-ordinate returned is x from 0-320 and y from 0-568. This is easily accurate enough for getting the touch position in 99.9% of cases.


Now on Android I just tried the bit of code below on a little test app where I override the onTouchEvent in the main activity

When you touch the screen it actually gives you the pixel co-ordinates that in my case correspond with a Nexus 4 which goes from x 0-768 and y 0-1280 this is more accurate than iOS but in reality make no difference.


@Override
public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) {
// MotionEvent object holds X-Y values
if(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN) {
String text = "You click at x = " + event.getX() + " and y = " + event.getY();
Toast.makeText(this, text, Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
}
return super.onTouchEvent(event);
}

I think i will go with the Finish companies results

What people will do when they don't wish to accept reality

Since you probably have no idea on how iOS or Android work I'll take your opinion with a big pinch of salt

All you've done there is establish the touch sensor resolution for a particular device. That has no bearing on the accuracy: reported vs actual position, which, without an accurate mechanism of determining actual, you won't be able to try at home.

Report lost all sense of credibility when I saw it was from the daily mail. Surprised they didn't claim that touchscreens give you cancer while they were at it!

Well this and if you search the previous from that reporter there are a lot of 'anti-apple' type of articles.

Perhaps but hard to see how that machine could really be calibrated to give any real credible data. I mean the tolerance of +- 1mm is pretty ridiculous anyway compared to the size of a human finger.

They are obviously different technologies.

My only contention is to ask which make of screen they used for the iPhone.
I think there are 3 different ones around and whilst accuracy is as per the priced contract, obviously one make will be better than another.

To test any iPhone you need to source all the different screens on each 5s. They will vary.
The other weird thing is the the pixels on the S4 are much closer so obviously you need high accuracy to function better.
With 3x less data on screen to click it obviously matters less on the low resolution iPhone.

OK, unlike your laboratory standard test calculated on the back of a fag packet

Umm perhaps that's why they say much of this may not be noticed by the user, try reading it before you rubbish it. They also provide details on how you can try the results perhaps try that also with your 5s.

*facepalm*

Here's the same story on GSMArena, does that help?

No not really. I'm very cynical about these type of tests though.

I've just tried typing on an Nexus 4 and iPhone 5s. I can't detect any real world actual inaccuracies in either.

The Nexus 4 I do prefer as the screen is wider and I prefer the keyboard on Androids

Also if you do any sort of game with a mouse joint with a physics object for example where you are selecting an object on the screen you normally have to offset the coordinates a little bit further up the screen to take into account the fact that a human will be using a shallower angle at the top than the bottom.

No human will use their finger perpendicular to the screen in all positions of the screen.