Wasn't this covered already with "Arial vs. Helvetia"? (http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/arial-versus-helvetica/ http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/aria

Wasn't this covered already with "Arial vs. Helvetia"? (http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/arial-versus-helvetica/ http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/arial-versus-helvetica...) I think what's going to distinguish these fonts isn't their individual character forms (which I do think are significantly different, perhaps even more so than Arial and Helvetica), but their optimisations. That is, how Roboto has been given ligatures, kerning, and hinting to make it work well on mobile phone screens at the sizes it'll be rendered at. (Also, the typewar quiz is a little unfair: it's hard to scrutinise character width and it doesn't seem to include numerals---areas where there are quite noticeable differences between the two.)