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

Apple makes great devices, and I wouldn't use any other phone and tablet, but I think people like Gruber have been completely blind to the technological shortcomings of iOS devices in this area, because Steve Jobs told them styli are stupid, and the iPad is going to disrupt this-and-that.

It also brings up the whole "to stylus or not to stylus" discussion again, because one of the main reasons you wouldn't want to use a stylus for an iPad is that it highlights just how (comparatively) poor the touch latency is for the tasks that lend themselves to work with styli.

It perhaps best underscores that iPads are very much - still - disruptive technology, which by definition is in many ways inferior than sustaining technologies, but makes up for it in other compelling ways.

It's one of the many reminders that we shouldn't get too busy throwing out everything paper and analogue. Disruption is not synonymous with obviation.

And just for those who care, Rheyne does a phenomenal job of using iPads as controllers (http://vimeo.com/72861463)

It is a big deal but I don't think the majority of users are bothered because they see it as an inherent trait of a computer to lag.

http://www.collectingsmiles.com/news/measuring-latency-in-co...

iPhone 5: 81 ms

Galaxy S3: 104 ms

Galaxy Note: 71 ms

Nintendo 3DS: 23 ms

PS Vita: 49 ms

And, to add a tv game console into the mix, apparently the latency between input on a PS3 wireless controller and home screen interaction is also about 50 ms.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3725/measuring_respons...

Much of their competition treats user experience just like any other consumer electronics company: If it doesn't crash, ship it!

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/ ), 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.

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!

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.

For the first time in years iPhone starts to behave like Windows before turn of annoying settings. And here I can't even turn them off. Jobs would simply not let them be.

I didn't notice this until I got my WP phone, but now that I've had that experience, I have trouble going back (note: I switch between iOS,Android,WP(7) every few weeks).

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Android's input system is in C++ anyway.

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.

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).

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).

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.

“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).

In the end it boils down to user preference, user experience and individual weighing of those. Some people don't care if the image stutters a bit at times, and for other's it's a major annoyance. Thus simplifying this all to "performance doesn't matter, good ideas do" absolutism is nonsense.

Besides some of us care about things like efficiency. I don't want to pay for a 1200 MHz processor when a 800 MHz would be equivalent given that programmer would have thought a bit more about how to implement things and not just ignorantly thought that "prematu... ALL optimization is root of all evil!", as it seems to be a common "wisdom" these days. That's nothing but sloppy culture, laziness and ignorance mixed together with a bit of cost analysis thrown in. User experience matters, and poor responsiveness is one of the most detrimental things when it comes to that in many applications.