12 ms·

Apple’s iPhone 5 touchscreen is 2.5 times faster than Android devices

294 points by bumbledraven 13y ago

kmfrk 13y ago
To get an idea of the impact and importance of touch latency, see this intriguing demo by the Microsoft Applied Sciences Group: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4. Drawing is one of those things that has felt awful on iOS devices to me.
- joeblau 13y ago
  That video was a great. Thanks for sharing it.
  - kmfrk 13y ago
    It's one of my favourite technology videos/demos of all time. Every time someone criticizes Microsoft, I remember this video, knowing Microsoft's failures aren't for lack of talent.
    - theon144 13y ago
      Sadly, Microsoft's research group and just about everyone else at Microsoft aren't the same people at all :\
- Pxtl 13y ago
  Yep. There's a decent homebrew paint app on the Nintendo DS that runs circles around the smartphone counterparts... The Ds has a joke of a processor, terrible resolution, and no memory worth mentioning. But it has a resistive pressure-sensitive touchscreen and a stylus. That's enough to make a huge difference. Resistive touchscreens are fast and pressure sensitive, allowing far better conditions for art.
  - aikinai 13y ago
    The sad thing is that official games aren't allowed to support the pressure-sensitivity provided by the DS hardware, so it's only used in homebrew apps like the paint app you mentioned.
    - MBCook 13y ago
      Do you know why that is? For example, does the pressure-sensitivy vary wildly between individual screens?
      - Pxtl 13y ago
        Incredibly so. Calibrating the aforementioned paint app is a huge bitch. But it's great afterwards.
        archagon 13y ago
        I remember reading somewhere that the DS homebrew "pressure sensitivity" was merely a hack. Since you hit more neighboring pixels when you push the stylus down, you get more "pressure". (This could be outdated information, though.)
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Drawing is one of those things that has felt awful on iOS devices to me. Compared to what, since, according to TFA they have the smallest touch latency? Perhaps you haven't tried the right apps. Most drawing apps (including major names, like Autodesk's) have slow-ass drawing code. Heck, some painting apps are even slow on my iMac (Corel Painter, ArtRage). That's not because of "touch latency" though. It's because of slow draw engines. And I say that, because I've seen apps with very fast responsiveness. Try Procreate ( http://procreate.si/ http://procreate.si/ ), which uses the fastest engine I've seen (specially coded in OpenGL and 3D-accelerated). And check the artwork created with it by some of the community users (there are 2-3 videos on their site it's AMAZING). Two other apps I found fast (but not as fast) are: Ideas, by Adobe, and Paper.
  - kmfrk 13y ago
    Compared to what Paper, dude(tte)! The analogue, lowercase-letter kind. :) Paper and Procreate are excellent apps, but the input lag is very noticeable on my iPad 3; if you move your finger really fast and stop, you can see that it takes a short amount of time, before the drawn line catches your finger. It wasn't long ago that dead-tree books were preferable to tablets, before Retina was a thing. And you could still argue print books are preferable. Sometimes, the best Technology can achieve is the bar set by the non-digital world, and until then, it's going to feel grating to pedantic curmudgeons like yours truly. :) +++ EDIT: A closing thought. The highest bar is always human perception: (1) The optimal FPS for a videogame is, to my knowledge, 60. (2) The optimal display resolution for a reading device is, TMK, ~326 PPI (Retina). That is the goal. Anything lower than that will stick out and annoy people like me. Anything higher is not for the engineers, but the marketing department.
    - lukeschlather 13y ago
      have you tried the microsoft surface pro?
      - kmfrk 13y ago
        Nope - I haven't even seen one!
- mistercow 13y ago
  Of course the video is a little bit misleading when it talks about 1ms refresh, since touch response stops being the limiting factor before that point. AFAIK the fastest refresh rate for any phone on the market is 250Hz. That's 4ms refresh, which is great, but of course you also have to factor in time to actually process the touch event, change the image, and render it.
  - nrivadeneira 13y ago
    It's not misleading at all. They specifically said it was a test setup and stated that their aim is to be at around 1ms latency in the next decade. Obviously that means working on the other limiting factors to get there as well. It's not like they'll just try to get the touch response to 1ms and ignore screen refresh rates.
  - rorrr2 13y ago
    If we want a 60Hz app, the touch latency + processing + display shouldn't exceed 16.7ms. 1ms touch latency would be nice indeed, but I think 5-8ms would work just as well on most devices.
- neonkiwi 13y ago
  I've done some research which involved the perceptual effects of latency, so I was interested in the test rig from their video and found a paper they published in ACM about it: http://edgey.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/p453-ng.pdf http://edgey.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/p453-ng.pdf Turns out that to achieve this 1ms latency system (once you have that, it's simple to add artificial latency) they had an FPGA directly processing touch data from a resistive sensor over a 2 MBps serial (optical) connection, computing the center of mass and directly driving a DLP projection display so that parallax between the surface being touched and the display would be eliminated. Nice rig!
joeblau 13y ago
I have the Lumia 920 and when I have to develop on my iPhone 4 or use a friends iPhone 5/4s/4, this is my main problem. Lumia screen is so responsive that even iPhones 5 feels sluggish to me. Typing is especially challenging so it's nice to see that $AAPL addressed the screen response. Next upgrade to the screen needs to be to fix the size.
- ryanpetrich 13y ago
  Is the Lumia 920's touch digitizer significantly different from the Lumia 928's? (which according to the graph has an average latency of 117ms)
  - joeblau 13y ago
    I'm not sure. I just know that my 920 feels very responsive, I actually haven't looked into why :). I'm sure that's the case for most consumers. They just notice something better but don't investigate.
- neoyagami 13y ago
  I remember my time with a galaxy s2 and the screen size was a pain. I really apreciate the path Apple choose with the size. So i dont get your point in this aspect
  - joeblau 13y ago
    I had the iPhone, iPh3G, iP3Gs, and 4. When I saw the size increase of the 5, I switched to Nokia just to see if a bigger screen (not just longer) was "really" a big deal. I think that the 5 inch screen is a really good size as long as you can keep the bezel size down (Which it isn't on the Lumia 920). Everyone has different preferences but I just which $AAPL had more options. The whole "thumb" argument is baseless.
    - MSM 13y ago
      I think you have valuable insight here and you've got some helpful anecdotal evidence, but the whole dollar sign before the ticker thing made me immediately think of the "M$" people. I'm assuming you're giving the ticker syntax, but it almost made me question your post, especially considering you're speaking against the iPhone. Just a knee jerk reaction from a passerby.
icegreentea 13y ago
It would be nice to know what their testing methodology was - specifically, was the measured times from touch to screen response, or from touch to OS response?
- kllrnohj 13y ago
  Read the actual report, not the venture beat blog spam: http://appglimpse.com/blog/ http://appglimpse.com/blog/ > We built simple, optimized apps to flash the full screen white* as quickly as possible in response to a touch. The apps contain minimal logic and use OpenGL/DirectX rendering to make sure the response is as quick as possible. Since these are barebones native apps doing nothing more than filling the screen in response to a touch, this benchmark defines the Minimum App Response Time (MART) a user could experience on a mobile app on each device.
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jared314 13y ago
Better link to Agawi's TouchMarks I benchmarking setup: http://appglimpse.com/blog/touchmarks-i-smart-phone-touch-screen-latencies/ http://appglimpse.com/blog/touchmarks-i-smart-phone-touch-sc...
programminggeek 13y ago
This kind of responsiveness is actually the kind of thing that Apple is sort of famous for by designing both the hardware and the software, but it is surprising that Samsung is still behind. I think the other thing that is not very often taken into consideration is how resolution impacts responsiveness. The more pixels the graphics card has to push, the slower the screen to redraw. Pairing bigger devices with big resolution means that achieving consistently high performance is harder without equal advances in graphics processing.
- devindotcom 13y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, they license a lot of stuff from Synaptics. But that said, many do so and don't get it working as well as Apple does. I talked with a Synaptics guy who said it's all about the implementation, and "bad" or "slow" touchscreens are generally just poorly optimized in the OS.
barumbarum 13y ago
Is this also Objective-C vs Java?
- tosseraccount 13y ago
  Yeah, C should give you 2x Java
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
ultrasaurus 13y ago
This is a brilliant submarine ad by Agawi. Reading it, I got the impressions that TouchMarks was some standard industry test (it doesn't seem to be).
Steko 13y ago
It seems like an important thing that benchmarks didn't even really exist for until now but I think the topline number is off? 55 ms to 114 ms how do they get 2.5 times faster? 2 times faster is already very impressive, no need to exaggerate further (although I guess thats how you get the clicks).
- rallison 13y ago
  It is possible the author was using the best times for each device for the calculation, which does approximately equal 2.5x. That said, I agree with your point.
  - Steko 13y ago
    Looking at the numbers a bit more closely I'm guessing the source was comparing iPhone 5 to the pack of Android phones where it's 2.1 to 2.3. This source said 2.0 to 2.5 which seems accurate with that so maybe it's Venturebeat playing up the bigger number.
kyro 13y ago
I'm so glad to see actual numbers for this. Time and time again I've been called delusional for saying that Android devices have more observable lag than iPhones. It is a very, very small component of the overall device and OS that has an enormous affect on the overall user experience, at least to me. It doesn't seem to be that big a deal to many as evident by phone sales, but it drives me absolutely nuts and is the main reason why I won't make the switch to Android.
- shasta 13y ago
  Agreed. The latency on the android devices I've tried prevents them from feeling real.
  - rustynails77 13y ago
    It depends on the device. Some Android devices are very snappy. For example, Samsung's 7" tablet appears to be very snappy to me - and I'd be hard pressed to pick the difference between it and my iPad 3rd gen. However, there are a few Android phones that are particularly laggy. The Galaxy III comes to mind - when I last used one. It didn't feel anywhere near as responsive as my iPhone.
    - aeroevan 13y ago
      The international version or the US (LTE) variant? I have the Verizon SGS3 (albeit running CyanogenMod) and the responsiveness is very good. TouchWiz (the Samsung Android overlay) probably adds some latency and CyanogenMod uses a newer kernel (3.4.xx vs 3.0.xx) so that might also contribute to the difference...
- YOSPOS 13y ago
  Most Anroid customers don't value these little touches. Being able to install various ROMs and have widgets on the homescreen plus other customizations are more important to them.
  - Steko 13y ago
simplexion 13y ago
Now you need to upgrade your eyes to notice it. Same thing with ridiculous ppi.
- coldtea 13y ago
  No, you don't. 114ms is quite perciptible latency -- it even breaks the persistence of vision barrier: "The human eye and its brain interface, the human visual system, can process 10 to 12 separate images per second, perceiving them individually." (Wikipedia) For reference, the average game updates the screen every 16ms (60fps) to feel smooth. Given those specs, responce latency of that level can be quite noticable. Here's a domain which it totally wrecks for Android: music apps (synths, etc). In audio, a delay of 114ms makes an electronic instrument annoying to play live. Musicians strive to get their audio latency around or below 32ms. If you have 114ms touch registration latency (from the moment you press something on the screen) and then add the audio processing latency, then it gets very ugly. That means that, however advanced your CPU and however small your audio buffer, you'll always have 114ms of latency minimum. To put it in perspective, it means you'll be one 1/16th note behind the beat on a 120bpm track. Latency is the basic reason audio developers avoid Android, and 90% of the cool stuff is for iOS (Moog, Waldorf, Korg, Cubase, etc).
  - simplexion 13y ago
    Is that the human eye with good vision? Does this include people with poor vision? I don't understand the link between vision and audio. Can you explain what you mean?
    - smilekzs 13y ago
      parent made 2 points on the 100ms latency: 1. in visual terms, it's not negligible even for average human eye (and normally speaking "bad vision" has something to do with focus, not FPS) 2. and it's devestating for input that triggers audio
- PeterisP 13y ago
  100 ms is a huge latency. A few usecases: 1) if you want UI visual response to be perceived as instant, you'd like to aim at 100ms or below - and you can't draw a response that fast if your code only gets the input signal 101ms after the actual physical touch. 2) if you want audio cues (say, a click sound when clicking a button; or app that plays drums/piano/whatever), then the noticeable latency is even lower; if you have to approach 100 ms then it will sound disconnected from the actual touch. 3) A common platformer or fighting game running at 60fps has 16ms per frame. If there's a 100ms input latency, then the action (say, jump or block) happens on a game world 6 frames off from what the player saw when doing that action; which tends to be too late. Only pro-players worry about single frames; but any average player is affected by 6 frame difference. For input devices - keyboards, mice, gamepads, whatever - the acceptable latencies (not good or great, but barely acceptable) are measured at tens of ms, tops. A 50 ms difference is not tiny, it's huge.
lnanek2 13y ago
Apple has had much better multitouch support from day one as well. They started with a grid of sensors that could detect over 10 touches or something like that. Android devices have slowly struggled up from single touch, to single touch with a few multitouch gestures, to multitouch with an inability to tell apart certain situations, to real multitouch for certain numbers of points. Mostly due to manufacturers always going with the cheapest touch sensors they could get away with.
- grogenaut 13y ago
  It also helps that they patented putting 2 fingers on the screen at once and so everyone was afraid to implement it until palm went mainstream with it on the pre.
  - makomk 13y ago
    Yeah, as far as I know mainstream Android hardware has supported multi-touch all the way back to the original G1, it's just that no-one dared do anything with it due to Apple's patents.
danielrm26 13y ago
A good example of Apple "intangibles" becoming tangible. These combine to become experience, which is really what it's about. Nice to actually have a handle for something as important as this element of a user's enjoyment with using a touchscreen.
iansinke 13y ago
The graph is just slightly misleading -- the horizontal scale starts at 20, not 0.
- UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
  Not misleading and fairly standard practice. There is no value starting at 0 when the lowest device tested is 55, all you'd do is shift everything to the right or make it smaller and harder to see the distribution (which is the whole point showing the distribution from 55 to 123). As long as the graph goes up in consistent increments (in this case 10) and shows that all these devices could move to the left (i.e. get quicker than 55) I'd say the graph has done its job.
  - RobAtticus 13y ago
    Imagine if the x axis started at 50. The difference between the iPhone 5s and the next one would look massive -- much more than the 2-2.5x it is. That a lot of people do it ("standard practice") does not mean its not slightly misleading.
  - Grue3 13y ago
    No, it's misleading and terrible practice that is only used to introduce bias. It is absolutely unacceptable to hide origin point on histograms because it obscures the relative comparison between values.
rvijapurapu 13y ago
I would love to see the code for each of the tests. And most importantly the optimizations used for each. It's always important to get the baseline right before arriving at a conclusion.
bryanlarsen 13y ago
It would be interesting to get some numbers from a Tegra 4 device because touch latency is one of the selling features of that platform.
chatman 13y ago
Nice, at least the fanboys have something to be happy about. :-)
blinkingled 13y ago
Interesting that none of the Android devices tested are Tegra based. Nvidia being gaming focused had to do something about touch latency so they did DirectTouch which was designed for better latency and lower power draw. Given the architectural differences between DT and others, I think DT should do at least somewhat better. See here for example - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DehlRJZPsDY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DehlRJZPsDY .
Mikeb85 13y ago
And this is pretty much the difference between implementing the user-space in Obj-C versus Dalvik... I'm sure Meego would have been much better than Android, as surely Ubuntu touch and Tizen will be...
- kllrnohj 13y ago
  This has fuck all to do with Obj-c vs. Dalvik. Android's input system is in C++ anyway.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    There are JNI transitions happening between C++ and Java when calling the Apps event handler anyway. For those that bring NDK up, the generated code runs in a separate thread inside Dalvik, and you have the delay of using UNIX pipes for the events.
amattn 13y ago
This statement is a bit ridiculous: > "The team built a device dubbed Touchscope that can measure response times to a level of accuracy that is plus or minus 4 milliseconds. It then adds the cloud processing response time to calculate the actual delays experienced by users." No way the cloud is processing anything having to do with touch handling.
- graue 13y ago
  You misread. They make a mobile app that streams stuff from their cloud. Therefore, to calculate actual delays in their app, they must add network response times and touch latency.
blehn 13y ago
It's a shame that Apple is negating that responsiveness with painfully slow transitions in iOS 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZQC_W0c-C8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZQC_W0c-C8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK2yVUkyjE0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK2yVUkyjE0
- kmfrk 13y ago
  I have a sneaking, completely unsubstantiated suspicion that many of the weird transitions on iOS 7 are to hide choppy performance. They are definitely way too long for someone to have seriously considered it a good idea on its own. It drives me completely mental that I get a fade-in transition, just by turning on the lock screen of my iPad.
  - CamperBob2 13y ago
    Yeah, these kinds of shenanigans date back to the first 2G iPhone, and they were just as obvious at the time, too.
    - wiredfool 13y ago
      Try zoom rects, no later than '95 and System 6. Old school compact era.
  - ajross 13y ago
    That's not unlikely, and it's not insane either. Processes are getting bigger, frameworks are taking more memory, and things take longer to fetch back in on app transfers. So if you want the apps to be snappy, you have to make sure they're in memory. Android devices have settled on clubbing the problem over the head with 2G of RAM (basically keeping stuff from being paged out to start with), while Apple went with 1G and has to play more subtle tricks. Performance is about tradeoffs. The stuff measured in the article is response time of foreground apps. Getting the app into the foreground to begin with isn't free.
    - gtufano 13y ago
nwhitehead 13y ago
It's fun to measure these sorts of numbers for all kinds of devices. You don't need equipment that is too fancy, a Casio Exilim EX-ZR10 (cheap!) is good enough to get numbers within 4ms by framecounting the high speed videos. I personally find input lag on Android devices infuriating, I wish more attention were devoted to fixing it.
- modeless 13y ago
  It can be even easier than that: I wrote a benchmark that allows you to measure input latency for web browsers without any specialized hardware or cameras: http://google.github.io/latency-benchmark http://google.github.io/latency-benchmark Of course this technique can't tell you the hardware latency of a touchscreen or display, but it can measure all of the latency introduced by software, which can be quite significant (and as a software developer, the software latency is the part you can actually influence).
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bennesvig 13y ago
This is one of the main reasons I switched from a Droid to an iPhone. I also had an iPod touch at the time and the difference in lag when surfing the web always frustrating on the Droid.
6thSigma 13y ago
Perhaps the iOS app they built to test its responsiveness is more efficient than the Android app they built to test its responsiveness?
mehuldesai 13y ago
Excuse me, but why all this energy on a millisecond type performance change. Why dont you guys focus on build apps that solve problems or are new companies. Your energies and brains are misplaced. Maybe its fun though. Here's the deal. Instagram, Pinterest or SnapChat probably never considered about the time it takes for an iphone generation X to perform. They didn't design for it, they designed what the user needed and wanted. I would say millisecond snapness isnt perceived by lets say 98% of the users of these systems. Focus on the application. Whats missing in mobile ? Facebook and Twitter are missing the picture. Focus on that guys, you are smart, but put energy on the big problems and not some low level hardware/software layer.
- codex 13y ago
  Perhaps it stems from Steve Jobs's philosophy on quality: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” As for Instagram, Pinterest or SnapChat: they won the lottery. They were in the right place at the right time, and when that happens, you could design a piece of junk and still experience massive success, a least temporarily, as long as you have the one feature that matters (re: MySpace, MS-DOS).
  - mehuldesai 13y ago
    Quality should be there overall, but especially on those things that really matter. This may be features for an app like facebook, or performance in a highly responsive game. My point is blindly following performance is not achieving quality. Quality is in the eyes of the user and has different meanings depending on what the user perceives and is doing. We could say the web experience using browsers has extremely bad quality characteristics from an engineering point of view, yet it changed the world. So maybe Steve wasnt so spot on :) On Instagram, have you read about its starting and also Pinterest. Instagram had a product about Bourbin or something that was not a widely used app, but did attach to a niche of presumably drinkers. What made Instagram is that they somehow recognized that people on the Bourbin site were really into the pics taken of their hobby. Instagrams next app was a buggy system apparently! However, I recall reading it was that they recognized the uptick by recognizing the users wanted to post pics (with the filter stuff). So here, there was no real quality, just a feature not exposed well in the social market. Pinterest also seemed to recognize that wedding dresses and women gained them traction. In my judgement its this recognition of opportunity and gaps in the social market combined with what you say, the right time and place. Right time and place can also mean partially that there is a need in the market for something thats not well done.
ppradhan 13y ago
Anyone has any idea what the iPhone 5 touch screen is compared to the Nokia Lumias? The touch on them is pretty damn fast too, clearly faster than Android devices. But iPhone does still feel slightly faster... Maybe Lumia's and iPhones are almost on par.
DavidWanjiru 13y ago
Would I, with my naked senses (eyes, touch) be able to tell the difference between a 55ms response time and 117ms response time? Alternatively, does such a difference add up or combine with other factors that ultimately make it noticeable to me? How? And while we're still at it, is this winning performance by Apple touchscreens a function of the quality of the screen itself (or components), other hardware (ICs and what nots) that work with the screen and are a factor in how it responds, superior code at OS level? I'd love to hear such details, as opposed to merely telling me 55ms vs 120ms.
- Derbasti 13y ago
  In general, your visual response time is about 200 ms. Anything below that is fine for regular visual feedback such as highlighting a button after it has been pressed. This is due to latency in the processing of visual information in the brain. Touch screens are somewhat unique however in that they track physical movement directly. This means that they do not only have to compete with the latencies in the visual system, but also with the predictions of physical movement that we do. Even though we can percieve visual information only at a 200 ms delay, our predictions of the physical world are compensated for that. Thus, even small latencies are percievable. I think Microsoft did some research on this and they concluded that even single-millisecond delays in touch screen tracking were noticeable. They even claimed that sub-millisecond delays felt "completely different" and much more real.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    Perceived audio latencies are much lower - I believe this is why designers don't include much audio cues in mobile UI's; you can do that with 3-6ms latency of keyboards/mice, but not with 50-100ms latencies.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
So in addition to having smaller pixels than Android devices with undetectably small pixels, Apple now has faster reactions that Android devices with undetectably fast reactions. I'm looking forward to hearing about the new iPhone's unmatched fidelity in reproducing ultraviolet images and ultrasonic sounds.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  The touch latency is without question detectable.
  - untog 13y ago
    Is it? I've switched between iPhone and Android and I've never noticed it. OS lag, yes - but Android has improved on that a lot in recent years.
    - MasterScrat 13y ago
      > I've switched between iPhone and Android and I've never noticed it. OS lag, yes And how exactly do you tell apart OS lag from touch latency?
      - PhasmaFelis 13y ago
        Touch latency is consistent across every application, in all load conditions. OS latency varies.
    - RivieraKid 13y ago
      I find the lag noticable and annoying when dragging something, e.g. scrolling a web page.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Even the iPhone's measured 50 ms must be clearly detectable (I don't have one, so can't check). A trivial example - have an app with a picture of a snare drum that when tapped will play a sound of such drum. It's well known f the delay beteen physical touch is more than, say, 20ms - then it will sound "not instant", the sound will be perceived by your brain as a separate event; and even 10+ ms will feel delayed to any drummer.
rly_ItsMe 13y ago
Now that kind of Flame Wars start again. I remember the times where in every Mac Magazine you've found a comparison between Macs and 'PCs' where they did measure the times of flipping Images in Photoshop and were proud when the Mac was 0.5 sec faster than the Windows pendant. I don't care about those kind of benchmark, because its not really necessary in the daily routine of handling a smartphone. Can I do some calls? - Fine Can I sync my calendar and contacts? - Fine If the reaction/ respond time of the GUI is acceptable and without some breaks, I don't care about 1/10 sec in respond time.
- MasterScrat 13y ago
  > Can I do some calls? - Fine Can I sync my calendar and contacts? - Fine Then it doesn't sound like you need a device like the ones they are testing... For heavy users I can assure you touch latency is a big deal.
buster 13y ago
Like a single person on earth EVER complained "boy, does my smartphone touchscreen not react"... yeah... Actually, i wouldn't have thought it would be >100ms for my HTC One, but it's certainly small enough that i cannot see a difference.
- damien 13y ago
  It is really noticeable when dragging something with your finger and the object you are dragging doesn't stay under your finger. I'm actually surprised the delay on all those devices are so high, I mean I can ping a Google server that's in another city 140 miles away from me in under 10ms...
- rsynnott 13y ago
  Isn't sluggishness and feeling unnatural one of the more common complaints about Android?
g4ur4v 13y ago
Apple's iPhone5 is also 2.5 times expensive that Android devices .
- rsynnott 13y ago
  The devices shown had similar RRPs to the iPhone 5 when it was still on sale, with the exception of the Moto X.
6ren 13y ago
An intuitive way to sense latency is to drag you finger and see how far behind the cursor trails. Research showed that people can perceive even quite low latency: http://www.techspot.com/news/47784-advances-in-touch-screens-promise-1ms-input-lag-instead-of-100ms.html http://www.techspot.com/news/47784-advances-in-touch-screens... (NOTE: the article incorrectly states this is a device - it is NOT, it's just an experimental setup to measure latency perception, i.e. fake.) I would expect the whole processing path - touch, bandwidth, CPU, RAM, OS, app, GPU, display - to factor into latency, just as it does for VR (see John Carmack's talk on latency for Oculus Rift). Interestingly, mouse cursors seem instant to me (below perceptible latency), though it's slightly harder to tell, because the mouse isn't on the screen (and if you put it on the screen, the scaling is way off).
n0on3 13y ago
Think about this: iOS7 brand new interface sucks so much that on previous iPhones it lags EXACTLY like poor Android-based devices
- epo 13y ago
  I have a 4S. No it doesn't.
ksec 13y ago
While i have always felt the difference. I never knew about the numbers. And while iPhone wins @ 55ms, i still think that is a very high number for input latency. Would have wanted Sub 20ms.
ricardobeat 13y ago
I and a couple friends used to compare the iPhone/iPad vs Android by touching the middle of the screen and wiggling it sideways really fast. iOS is always 100% precise - the area under your fingertip is exactly the same as where you started - while Android only started to keep up after Jellybean, and is still not as good.
spupy 13y ago
Newer products better than older products. More news at 11.
sengstrom 13y ago
"Even a two-year old iPhone 4 beat out the other Android devices,” Relan said. “You expect this from Apple’s design team, while others may view their responsiveness as good enough. Now we know why the Android touch keyboard is not as snappy." They know why but don't bother to tell us in the article...
capkutay 13y ago
Is anyone else surprised by the wave of positive media towards Apple these past few weeks? I'm honestly so used to Apple being bashed that I was even expecting this article to be negative near the end. I was also expecting to see the top HN comment say something along the lines of "no this is BS I could never use Apple products".
madmax96 13y ago
This kind of makes sense. Whenever I've used an iThing, the screen always felt a lot more responsive than other devices. From a software perspective, their kernel is optimized for io, and so is the BSD userland. Not a surprising bench mark.
moca 13y ago
The article mis-interpret the data. It actually measures the full UI latency, which includes touch input, event system, and UI graphics system. It is somewhat well know that Android event and graphics systems have higher latency. At least, I took it for granted for 5 years. The touchscreen is a hardware component, its latency mostly depends on hardware choice. Nintendo 3DS and PS Vita have much lower latency, because the software stack is highly optimized for games (which obviously wants low latency).
code_duck 13y ago
This must be one reason that musical instrument apps are unusable on Android (all the way from my Moto Droid 2 to my Galaxy S3, one can't play drum apps in a way that sounds decent at all) while they are generally excellent on iOS. Per discussions I've had in the past the audio layer in Android is part of the problem. 60-100 ms delay is a lot too, though and that surely is adding to the perceived lack of responsiveness.
beyondcompute 13y ago
And who doubted?

294 points by bumbledraven 13y ago

kmfrk 13y ago

To get an idea of the impact and importance of touch latency, see this intriguing demo by the Microsoft Applied Sciences Group: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4. Drawing is one of those things that has felt awful on iOS devices to me.

joeblau 13y ago
That video was a great. Thanks for sharing it.
- kmfrk 13y ago
  It's one of my favourite technology videos/demos of all time. Every time someone criticizes Microsoft, I remember this video, knowing Microsoft's failures aren't for lack of talent.
  - theon144 13y ago
    Sadly, Microsoft's research group and just about everyone else at Microsoft aren't the same people at all :\
Pxtl 13y ago
Yep. There's a decent homebrew paint app on the Nintendo DS that runs circles around the smartphone counterparts... The Ds has a joke of a processor, terrible resolution, and no memory worth mentioning. But it has a resistive pressure-sensitive touchscreen and a stylus. That's enough to make a huge difference. Resistive touchscreens are fast and pressure sensitive, allowing far better conditions for art.
- aikinai 13y ago
  The sad thing is that official games aren't allowed to support the pressure-sensitivity provided by the DS hardware, so it's only used in homebrew apps like the paint app you mentioned.
  - MBCook 13y ago
    Do you know why that is? For example, does the pressure-sensitivy vary wildly between individual screens?
    - Pxtl 13y ago
      Incredibly so. Calibrating the aforementioned paint app is a huge bitch. But it's great afterwards.
      - archagon 13y ago
        I remember reading somewhere that the DS homebrew "pressure sensitivity" was merely a hack. Since you hit more neighboring pixels when you push the stylus down, you get more "pressure". (This could be outdated information, though.)
coldtea 13y ago
>Drawing is one of those things that has felt awful on iOS devices to me. Compared to what, since, according to TFA they have the smallest touch latency? Perhaps you haven't tried the right apps. Most drawing apps (including major names, like Autodesk's) have slow-ass drawing code. Heck, some painting apps are even slow on my iMac (Corel Painter, ArtRage). That's not because of "touch latency" though. It's because of slow draw engines. And I say that, because I've seen apps with very fast responsiveness. Try Procreate ( http://procreate.si/ http://procreate.si/ ), which uses the fastest engine I've seen (specially coded in OpenGL and 3D-accelerated). And check the artwork created with it by some of the community users (there are 2-3 videos on their site it's AMAZING). Two other apps I found fast (but not as fast) are: Ideas, by Adobe, and Paper.
- kmfrk 13y ago
  Compared to what Paper, dude(tte)! The analogue, lowercase-letter kind. :) Paper and Procreate are excellent apps, but the input lag is very noticeable on my iPad 3; if you move your finger really fast and stop, you can see that it takes a short amount of time, before the drawn line catches your finger. It wasn't long ago that dead-tree books were preferable to tablets, before Retina was a thing. And you could still argue print books are preferable. Sometimes, the best Technology can achieve is the bar set by the non-digital world, and until then, it's going to feel grating to pedantic curmudgeons like yours truly. :) +++ EDIT: A closing thought. The highest bar is always human perception: (1) The optimal FPS for a videogame is, to my knowledge, 60. (2) The optimal display resolution for a reading device is, TMK, ~326 PPI (Retina). That is the goal. Anything lower than that will stick out and annoy people like me. Anything higher is not for the engineers, but the marketing department.
  - lukeschlather 13y ago
    have you tried the microsoft surface pro?
    - kmfrk 13y ago
      Nope - I haven't even seen one!
mistercow 13y ago
Of course the video is a little bit misleading when it talks about 1ms refresh, since touch response stops being the limiting factor before that point. AFAIK the fastest refresh rate for any phone on the market is 250Hz. That's 4ms refresh, which is great, but of course you also have to factor in time to actually process the touch event, change the image, and render it.
- nrivadeneira 13y ago
  It's not misleading at all. They specifically said it was a test setup and stated that their aim is to be at around 1ms latency in the next decade. Obviously that means working on the other limiting factors to get there as well. It's not like they'll just try to get the touch response to 1ms and ignore screen refresh rates.
- rorrr2 13y ago
  If we want a 60Hz app, the touch latency + processing + display shouldn't exceed 16.7ms. 1ms touch latency would be nice indeed, but I think 5-8ms would work just as well on most devices.
neonkiwi 13y ago
I've done some research which involved the perceptual effects of latency, so I was interested in the test rig from their video and found a paper they published in ACM about it: http://edgey.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/p453-ng.pdf http://edgey.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/p453-ng.pdf Turns out that to achieve this 1ms latency system (once you have that, it's simple to add artificial latency) they had an FPGA directly processing touch data from a resistive sensor over a 2 MBps serial (optical) connection, computing the center of mass and directly driving a DLP projection display so that parallax between the surface being touched and the display would be eliminated. Nice rig!

joeblau 13y ago

I have the Lumia 920 and when I have to develop on my iPhone 4 or use a friends iPhone 5/4s/4, this is my main problem. Lumia screen is so responsive that even iPhones 5 feels sluggish to me. Typing is especially challenging so it's nice to see that $AAPL addressed the screen response. Next upgrade to the screen needs to be to fix the size.

ryanpetrich 13y ago
Is the Lumia 920's touch digitizer significantly different from the Lumia 928's? (which according to the graph has an average latency of 117ms)
- joeblau 13y ago
  I'm not sure. I just know that my 920 feels very responsive, I actually haven't looked into why :). I'm sure that's the case for most consumers. They just notice something better but don't investigate.
neoyagami 13y ago
I remember my time with a galaxy s2 and the screen size was a pain. I really apreciate the path Apple choose with the size. So i dont get your point in this aspect
- joeblau 13y ago
  I had the iPhone, iPh3G, iP3Gs, and 4. When I saw the size increase of the 5, I switched to Nokia just to see if a bigger screen (not just longer) was "really" a big deal. I think that the 5 inch screen is a really good size as long as you can keep the bezel size down (Which it isn't on the Lumia 920). Everyone has different preferences but I just which $AAPL had more options. The whole "thumb" argument is baseless.
  - MSM 13y ago
    I think you have valuable insight here and you've got some helpful anecdotal evidence, but the whole dollar sign before the ticker thing made me immediately think of the "M$" people. I'm assuming you're giving the ticker syntax, but it almost made me question your post, especially considering you're speaking against the iPhone. Just a knee jerk reaction from a passerby.

icegreentea 13y ago

It would be nice to know what their testing methodology was - specifically, was the measured times from touch to screen response, or from touch to OS response?

kllrnohj 13y ago
Read the actual report, not the venture beat blog spam: http://appglimpse.com/blog/ http://appglimpse.com/blog/ > We built simple, optimized apps to flash the full screen white* as quickly as possible in response to a touch. The apps contain minimal logic and use OpenGL/DirectX rendering to make sure the response is as quick as possible. Since these are barebones native apps doing nothing more than filling the screen in response to a touch, this benchmark defines the Minimum App Response Time (MART) a user could experience on a mobile app on each device.

deleted 13y ago

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jared314 13y ago

Better link to Agawi's TouchMarks I benchmarking setup: http://appglimpse.com/blog/touchmarks-i-smart-phone-touch-screen-latencies/ http://appglimpse.com/blog/touchmarks-i-smart-phone-touch-sc...

programminggeek 13y ago

This kind of responsiveness is actually the kind of thing that Apple is sort of famous for by designing both the hardware and the software, but it is surprising that Samsung is still behind. I think the other thing that is not very often taken into consideration is how resolution impacts responsiveness. The more pixels the graphics card has to push, the slower the screen to redraw. Pairing bigger devices with big resolution means that achieving consistently high performance is harder without equal advances in graphics processing.

devindotcom 13y ago
If I'm not mistaken, they license a lot of stuff from Synaptics. But that said, many do so and don't get it working as well as Apple does. I talked with a Synaptics guy who said it's all about the implementation, and "bad" or "slow" touchscreens are generally just poorly optimized in the OS.

barumbarum 13y ago

Is this also Objective-C vs Java?

tosseraccount 13y ago
Yeah, C should give you 2x Java
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

ultrasaurus 13y ago

This is a brilliant submarine ad by Agawi. Reading it, I got the impressions that TouchMarks was some standard industry test (it doesn't seem to be).

Steko 13y ago

It seems like an important thing that benchmarks didn't even really exist for until now but I think the topline number is off? 55 ms to 114 ms how do they get 2.5 times faster? 2 times faster is already very impressive, no need to exaggerate further (although I guess thats how you get the clicks).

rallison 13y ago
It is possible the author was using the best times for each device for the calculation, which does approximately equal 2.5x. That said, I agree with your point.
- Steko 13y ago
  Looking at the numbers a bit more closely I'm guessing the source was comparing iPhone 5 to the pack of Android phones where it's 2.1 to 2.3. This source said 2.0 to 2.5 which seems accurate with that so maybe it's Venturebeat playing up the bigger number.

kyro 13y ago

I'm so glad to see actual numbers for this. Time and time again I've been called delusional for saying that Android devices have more observable lag than iPhones. It is a very, very small component of the overall device and OS that has an enormous affect on the overall user experience, at least to me. It doesn't seem to be that big a deal to many as evident by phone sales, but it drives me absolutely nuts and is the main reason why I won't make the switch to Android.

shasta 13y ago
Agreed. The latency on the android devices I've tried prevents them from feeling real.
- rustynails77 13y ago
  It depends on the device. Some Android devices are very snappy. For example, Samsung's 7" tablet appears to be very snappy to me - and I'd be hard pressed to pick the difference between it and my iPad 3rd gen. However, there are a few Android phones that are particularly laggy. The Galaxy III comes to mind - when I last used one. It didn't feel anywhere near as responsive as my iPhone.
  - aeroevan 13y ago
    The international version or the US (LTE) variant? I have the Verizon SGS3 (albeit running CyanogenMod) and the responsiveness is very good. TouchWiz (the Samsung Android overlay) probably adds some latency and CyanogenMod uses a newer kernel (3.4.xx vs 3.0.xx) so that might also contribute to the difference...
YOSPOS 13y ago
Most Anroid customers don't value these little touches. Being able to install various ROMs and have widgets on the homescreen plus other customizations are more important to them.
- Steko 13y ago

simplexion 13y ago

Now you need to upgrade your eyes to notice it. Same thing with ridiculous ppi.

coldtea 13y ago
No, you don't. 114ms is quite perciptible latency -- it even breaks the persistence of vision barrier: "The human eye and its brain interface, the human visual system, can process 10 to 12 separate images per second, perceiving them individually." (Wikipedia) For reference, the average game updates the screen every 16ms (60fps) to feel smooth. Given those specs, responce latency of that level can be quite noticable. Here's a domain which it totally wrecks for Android: music apps (synths, etc). In audio, a delay of 114ms makes an electronic instrument annoying to play live. Musicians strive to get their audio latency around or below 32ms. If you have 114ms touch registration latency (from the moment you press something on the screen) and then add the audio processing latency, then it gets very ugly. That means that, however advanced your CPU and however small your audio buffer, you'll always have 114ms of latency minimum. To put it in perspective, it means you'll be one 1/16th note behind the beat on a 120bpm track. Latency is the basic reason audio developers avoid Android, and 90% of the cool stuff is for iOS (Moog, Waldorf, Korg, Cubase, etc).
- simplexion 13y ago
  Is that the human eye with good vision? Does this include people with poor vision? I don't understand the link between vision and audio. Can you explain what you mean?
  - smilekzs 13y ago
    parent made 2 points on the 100ms latency: 1. in visual terms, it's not negligible even for average human eye (and normally speaking "bad vision" has something to do with focus, not FPS) 2. and it's devestating for input that triggers audio
PeterisP 13y ago
100 ms is a huge latency. A few usecases: 1) if you want UI visual response to be perceived as instant, you'd like to aim at 100ms or below - and you can't draw a response that fast if your code only gets the input signal 101ms after the actual physical touch. 2) if you want audio cues (say, a click sound when clicking a button; or app that plays drums/piano/whatever), then the noticeable latency is even lower; if you have to approach 100 ms then it will sound disconnected from the actual touch. 3) A common platformer or fighting game running at 60fps has 16ms per frame. If there's a 100ms input latency, then the action (say, jump or block) happens on a game world 6 frames off from what the player saw when doing that action; which tends to be too late. Only pro-players worry about single frames; but any average player is affected by 6 frame difference. For input devices - keyboards, mice, gamepads, whatever - the acceptable latencies (not good or great, but barely acceptable) are measured at tens of ms, tops. A 50 ms difference is not tiny, it's huge.

lnanek2 13y ago

Apple has had much better multitouch support from day one as well. They started with a grid of sensors that could detect over 10 touches or something like that. Android devices have slowly struggled up from single touch, to single touch with a few multitouch gestures, to multitouch with an inability to tell apart certain situations, to real multitouch for certain numbers of points. Mostly due to manufacturers always going with the cheapest touch sensors they could get away with.

grogenaut 13y ago
It also helps that they patented putting 2 fingers on the screen at once and so everyone was afraid to implement it until palm went mainstream with it on the pre.
- makomk 13y ago
  Yeah, as far as I know mainstream Android hardware has supported multi-touch all the way back to the original G1, it's just that no-one dared do anything with it due to Apple's patents.

danielrm26 13y ago

A good example of Apple "intangibles" becoming tangible. These combine to become experience, which is really what it's about. Nice to actually have a handle for something as important as this element of a user's enjoyment with using a touchscreen.

iansinke 13y ago

The graph is just slightly misleading -- the horizontal scale starts at 20, not 0.

UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
Not misleading and fairly standard practice. There is no value starting at 0 when the lowest device tested is 55, all you'd do is shift everything to the right or make it smaller and harder to see the distribution (which is the whole point showing the distribution from 55 to 123). As long as the graph goes up in consistent increments (in this case 10) and shows that all these devices could move to the left (i.e. get quicker than 55) I'd say the graph has done its job.
- RobAtticus 13y ago
  Imagine if the x axis started at 50. The difference between the iPhone 5s and the next one would look massive -- much more than the 2-2.5x it is. That a lot of people do it ("standard practice") does not mean its not slightly misleading.
- Grue3 13y ago
  No, it's misleading and terrible practice that is only used to introduce bias. It is absolutely unacceptable to hide origin point on histograms because it obscures the relative comparison between values.

rvijapurapu 13y ago

I would love to see the code for each of the tests. And most importantly the optimizations used for each. It's always important to get the baseline right before arriving at a conclusion.

bryanlarsen 13y ago

It would be interesting to get some numbers from a Tegra 4 device because touch latency is one of the selling features of that platform.

chatman 13y ago

Nice, at least the fanboys have something to be happy about. :-)

blinkingled 13y ago

Interesting that none of the Android devices tested are Tegra based. Nvidia being gaming focused had to do something about touch latency so they did DirectTouch which was designed for better latency and lower power draw. Given the architectural differences between DT and others, I think DT should do at least somewhat better. See here for example - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DehlRJZPsDY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DehlRJZPsDY .

Mikeb85 13y ago

And this is pretty much the difference between implementing the user-space in Obj-C versus Dalvik... I'm sure Meego would have been much better than Android, as surely Ubuntu touch and Tizen will be...

kllrnohj 13y ago
This has fuck all to do with Obj-c vs. Dalvik. Android's input system is in C++ anyway.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  There are JNI transitions happening between C++ and Java when calling the Apps event handler anyway. For those that bring NDK up, the generated code runs in a separate thread inside Dalvik, and you have the delay of using UNIX pipes for the events.

amattn 13y ago

This statement is a bit ridiculous: > "The team built a device dubbed Touchscope that can measure response times to a level of accuracy that is plus or minus 4 milliseconds. It then adds the cloud processing response time to calculate the actual delays experienced by users." No way the cloud is processing anything having to do with touch handling.

graue 13y ago
You misread. They make a mobile app that streams stuff from their cloud. Therefore, to calculate actual delays in their app, they must add network response times and touch latency.

blehn 13y ago

It's a shame that Apple is negating that responsiveness with painfully slow transitions in iOS 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZQC_W0c-C8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZQC_W0c-C8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK2yVUkyjE0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK2yVUkyjE0

kmfrk 13y ago
I have a sneaking, completely unsubstantiated suspicion that many of the weird transitions on iOS 7 are to hide choppy performance. They are definitely way too long for someone to have seriously considered it a good idea on its own. It drives me completely mental that I get a fade-in transition, just by turning on the lock screen of my iPad.
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  Yeah, these kinds of shenanigans date back to the first 2G iPhone, and they were just as obvious at the time, too.
  - wiredfool 13y ago
    Try zoom rects, no later than '95 and System 6. Old school compact era.
- ajross 13y ago
  That's not unlikely, and it's not insane either. Processes are getting bigger, frameworks are taking more memory, and things take longer to fetch back in on app transfers. So if you want the apps to be snappy, you have to make sure they're in memory. Android devices have settled on clubbing the problem over the head with 2G of RAM (basically keeping stuff from being paged out to start with), while Apple went with 1G and has to play more subtle tricks. Performance is about tradeoffs. The stuff measured in the article is response time of foreground apps. Getting the app into the foreground to begin with isn't free.
  - gtufano 13y ago

nwhitehead 13y ago

It's fun to measure these sorts of numbers for all kinds of devices. You don't need equipment that is too fancy, a Casio Exilim EX-ZR10 (cheap!) is good enough to get numbers within 4ms by framecounting the high speed videos. I personally find input lag on Android devices infuriating, I wish more attention were devoted to fixing it.

modeless 13y ago
It can be even easier than that: I wrote a benchmark that allows you to measure input latency for web browsers without any specialized hardware or cameras: http://google.github.io/latency-benchmark http://google.github.io/latency-benchmark Of course this technique can't tell you the hardware latency of a touchscreen or display, but it can measure all of the latency introduced by software, which can be quite significant (and as a software developer, the software latency is the part you can actually influence).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bennesvig 13y ago

This is one of the main reasons I switched from a Droid to an iPhone. I also had an iPod touch at the time and the difference in lag when surfing the web always frustrating on the Droid.

6thSigma 13y ago

Perhaps the iOS app they built to test its responsiveness is more efficient than the Android app they built to test its responsiveness?

mehuldesai 13y ago

Excuse me, but why all this energy on a millisecond type performance change. Why dont you guys focus on build apps that solve problems or are new companies. Your energies and brains are misplaced. Maybe its fun though. Here's the deal. Instagram, Pinterest or SnapChat probably never considered about the time it takes for an iphone generation X to perform. They didn't design for it, they designed what the user needed and wanted. I would say millisecond snapness isnt perceived by lets say 98% of the users of these systems. Focus on the application. Whats missing in mobile ? Facebook and Twitter are missing the picture. Focus on that guys, you are smart, but put energy on the big problems and not some low level hardware/software layer.

codex 13y ago
Perhaps it stems from Steve Jobs's philosophy on quality: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” As for Instagram, Pinterest or SnapChat: they won the lottery. They were in the right place at the right time, and when that happens, you could design a piece of junk and still experience massive success, a least temporarily, as long as you have the one feature that matters (re: MySpace, MS-DOS).
- mehuldesai 13y ago
  Quality should be there overall, but especially on those things that really matter. This may be features for an app like facebook, or performance in a highly responsive game. My point is blindly following performance is not achieving quality. Quality is in the eyes of the user and has different meanings depending on what the user perceives and is doing. We could say the web experience using browsers has extremely bad quality characteristics from an engineering point of view, yet it changed the world. So maybe Steve wasnt so spot on :) On Instagram, have you read about its starting and also Pinterest. Instagram had a product about Bourbin or something that was not a widely used app, but did attach to a niche of presumably drinkers. What made Instagram is that they somehow recognized that people on the Bourbin site were really into the pics taken of their hobby. Instagrams next app was a buggy system apparently! However, I recall reading it was that they recognized the uptick by recognizing the users wanted to post pics (with the filter stuff). So here, there was no real quality, just a feature not exposed well in the social market. Pinterest also seemed to recognize that wedding dresses and women gained them traction. In my judgement its this recognition of opportunity and gaps in the social market combined with what you say, the right time and place. Right time and place can also mean partially that there is a need in the market for something thats not well done.

ppradhan 13y ago

Anyone has any idea what the iPhone 5 touch screen is compared to the Nokia Lumias? The touch on them is pretty damn fast too, clearly faster than Android devices. But iPhone does still feel slightly faster... Maybe Lumia's and iPhones are almost on par.

DavidWanjiru 13y ago

Would I, with my naked senses (eyes, touch) be able to tell the difference between a 55ms response time and 117ms response time? Alternatively, does such a difference add up or combine with other factors that ultimately make it noticeable to me? How? And while we're still at it, is this winning performance by Apple touchscreens a function of the quality of the screen itself (or components), other hardware (ICs and what nots) that work with the screen and are a factor in how it responds, superior code at OS level? I'd love to hear such details, as opposed to merely telling me 55ms vs 120ms.

Derbasti 13y ago
In general, your visual response time is about 200 ms. Anything below that is fine for regular visual feedback such as highlighting a button after it has been pressed. This is due to latency in the processing of visual information in the brain. Touch screens are somewhat unique however in that they track physical movement directly. This means that they do not only have to compete with the latencies in the visual system, but also with the predictions of physical movement that we do. Even though we can percieve visual information only at a 200 ms delay, our predictions of the physical world are compensated for that. Thus, even small latencies are percievable. I think Microsoft did some research on this and they concluded that even single-millisecond delays in touch screen tracking were noticeable. They even claimed that sub-millisecond delays felt "completely different" and much more real.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Perceived audio latencies are much lower - I believe this is why designers don't include much audio cues in mobile UI's; you can do that with 3-6ms latency of keyboards/mice, but not with 50-100ms latencies.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

So in addition to having smaller pixels than Android devices with undetectably small pixels, Apple now has faster reactions that Android devices with undetectably fast reactions. I'm looking forward to hearing about the new iPhone's unmatched fidelity in reproducing ultraviolet images and ultrasonic sounds.

RivieraKid 13y ago
The touch latency is without question detectable.
- untog 13y ago
  Is it? I've switched between iPhone and Android and I've never noticed it. OS lag, yes - but Android has improved on that a lot in recent years.
  - MasterScrat 13y ago
    > I've switched between iPhone and Android and I've never noticed it. OS lag, yes And how exactly do you tell apart OS lag from touch latency?
    - PhasmaFelis 13y ago
      Touch latency is consistent across every application, in all load conditions. OS latency varies.
  - RivieraKid 13y ago
    I find the lag noticable and annoying when dragging something, e.g. scrolling a web page.
PeterisP 13y ago
Even the iPhone's measured 50 ms must be clearly detectable (I don't have one, so can't check). A trivial example - have an app with a picture of a snare drum that when tapped will play a sound of such drum. It's well known f the delay beteen physical touch is more than, say, 20ms - then it will sound "not instant", the sound will be perceived by your brain as a separate event; and even 10+ ms will feel delayed to any drummer.

rly_ItsMe 13y ago

Now that kind of Flame Wars start again. I remember the times where in every Mac Magazine you've found a comparison between Macs and 'PCs' where they did measure the times of flipping Images in Photoshop and were proud when the Mac was 0.5 sec faster than the Windows pendant. I don't care about those kind of benchmark, because its not really necessary in the daily routine of handling a smartphone. Can I do some calls? - Fine Can I sync my calendar and contacts? - Fine If the reaction/ respond time of the GUI is acceptable and without some breaks, I don't care about 1/10 sec in respond time.

MasterScrat 13y ago
> Can I do some calls? - Fine Can I sync my calendar and contacts? - Fine Then it doesn't sound like you need a device like the ones they are testing... For heavy users I can assure you touch latency is a big deal.

buster 13y ago

Like a single person on earth EVER complained "boy, does my smartphone touchscreen not react"... yeah... Actually, i wouldn't have thought it would be >100ms for my HTC One, but it's certainly small enough that i cannot see a difference.

damien 13y ago
It is really noticeable when dragging something with your finger and the object you are dragging doesn't stay under your finger. I'm actually surprised the delay on all those devices are so high, I mean I can ping a Google server that's in another city 140 miles away from me in under 10ms...
rsynnott 13y ago
Isn't sluggishness and feeling unnatural one of the more common complaints about Android?

g4ur4v 13y ago

Apple's iPhone5 is also 2.5 times expensive that Android devices .

rsynnott 13y ago
The devices shown had similar RRPs to the iPhone 5 when it was still on sale, with the exception of the Moto X.

6ren 13y ago

An intuitive way to sense latency is to drag you finger and see how far behind the cursor trails. Research showed that people can perceive even quite low latency: http://www.techspot.com/news/47784-advances-in-touch-screens-promise-1ms-input-lag-instead-of-100ms.html http://www.techspot.com/news/47784-advances-in-touch-screens... (NOTE: the article incorrectly states this is a device - it is NOT, it's just an experimental setup to measure latency perception, i.e. fake.) I would expect the whole processing path - touch, bandwidth, CPU, RAM, OS, app, GPU, display - to factor into latency, just as it does for VR (see John Carmack's talk on latency for Oculus Rift). Interestingly, mouse cursors seem instant to me (below perceptible latency), though it's slightly harder to tell, because the mouse isn't on the screen (and if you put it on the screen, the scaling is way off).

n0on3 13y ago

Think about this: iOS7 brand new interface sucks so much that on previous iPhones it lags EXACTLY like poor Android-based devices

epo 13y ago
I have a 4S. No it doesn't.

ksec 13y ago

While i have always felt the difference. I never knew about the numbers. And while iPhone wins @ 55ms, i still think that is a very high number for input latency. Would have wanted Sub 20ms.

ricardobeat 13y ago

I and a couple friends used to compare the iPhone/iPad vs Android by touching the middle of the screen and wiggling it sideways really fast. iOS is always 100% precise - the area under your fingertip is exactly the same as where you started - while Android only started to keep up after Jellybean, and is still not as good.

spupy 13y ago

Newer products better than older products. More news at 11.

sengstrom 13y ago

"Even a two-year old iPhone 4 beat out the other Android devices,” Relan said. “You expect this from Apple’s design team, while others may view their responsiveness as good enough. Now we know why the Android touch keyboard is not as snappy." They know why but don't bother to tell us in the article...

capkutay 13y ago

Is anyone else surprised by the wave of positive media towards Apple these past few weeks? I'm honestly so used to Apple being bashed that I was even expecting this article to be negative near the end. I was also expecting to see the top HN comment say something along the lines of "no this is BS I could never use Apple products".

madmax96 13y ago

This kind of makes sense. Whenever I've used an iThing, the screen always felt a lot more responsive than other devices. From a software perspective, their kernel is optimized for io, and so is the BSD userland. Not a surprising bench mark.

moca 13y ago

The article mis-interpret the data. It actually measures the full UI latency, which includes touch input, event system, and UI graphics system. It is somewhat well know that Android event and graphics systems have higher latency. At least, I took it for granted for 5 years. The touchscreen is a hardware component, its latency mostly depends on hardware choice. Nintendo 3DS and PS Vita have much lower latency, because the software stack is highly optimized for games (which obviously wants low latency).

code_duck 13y ago

This must be one reason that musical instrument apps are unusable on Android (all the way from my Moto Droid 2 to my Galaxy S3, one can't play drum apps in a way that sounds decent at all) while they are generally excellent on iOS. Per discussions I've had in the past the audio layer in Android is part of the problem. 60-100 ms delay is a lot too, though and that surely is adding to the perceived lack of responsiveness.

beyondcompute 13y ago

And who doubted?