Apple iPhone 5s and 5c touchscreen test shows surprising inaccuracies, Samsung Galaxy S III way more accurate

The Apple iPhone is the phone that brought high-accuracy capacitive touch screens to the mass market, but since then everyone has jumped on the bandwagon, and latest tests show that Apple devices like the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c actually have less accurate touchscreens that competitors like say the year-old Samsung Galaxy S III.

A new study by OptoFidelity for the first put smartphone touchscreens to a test by a robotic hand that touched the display at specific points and then compared what the phone actually registered. Interestingly, iPhones were most accurate in the bottom part of the screen - exactly where the keyboard is located, while in other parts of the display and even around the edges of the keyboard they do not register touch accurately at all.

In stark contrast, the accuracy of touchscreens like the one on the 2012 Samsung flagship, the Galasy S III, proved great all across the screen - top, bottom and center, and not just at the part where the keyboard is located.

Green areas show accurate touch registration, red once show deviations.

The revealing findings are backed up by charts and seem more than reliable - after all it’s a robotic hand that OptoFidelity used and not a shaky human hand.

The moral of the story is simple. Be more careful when you type on the iPhone keyboard, especially around the edges where the Q, O and P buttons are located. Don’t be too surprised if most of the typing mistakes you make occur there! The digression might look tiny - it’s just around 1mm - but let’s not forget that those buttons are not all that large either.