Techalyzer

It’s not your imagination. The touch screen on the Apple phone really does work better than the screens on the BlackBerry Storm, the Motorola Droid, the Nexus One and many other phones, even though all of these devices use essentially the same touch-sensing hardware.
All companies by their touch screens from the same set of suppliers but it is how the manufactures put the components together that calibrate the perfect touch and feel. Both experts and consumers know that the phone manufacturers rarely get this right.
The reason that the Apple stuff seems to work better is because there has been more energy put into such engineering details as the calibration of the touch sensor, the quality of firmware and the level of the integration into the phone’s user interface. It all comes down to how well the electronics and the mechanical hardware are integrated.”
Early touch screens were just layers of screen are separated by a narrow gap. A finger pushing down on the top layer makes contact with the bottom surface and the point of contact is computed by the sandwiched in electronics. These were called resistive touch screens and they were not very responsive. A stylus often had to be pressed hard into it before it would work.
The capacitive touchscreen in Apple’s iPhone changed the game, because it’s not pressure-sensitive. Instead, this kind of technology responds to the electrical properties of your skin, not the pressure of your finger, to figure out where you’re touching the screen. For the first time, just a light tap could open an application or a flicking gesture could effortlessly get the screen scrolling.
A projected capacitive touchscreen — the kind that’s usually used in phones — has a glass insulator coated with a transparent conductive layer. When a finger touches the surface of the screen, it distorts the electrostatic field. The location of the touch is computed and it is passed on to a software application that relates the touch into actions for the device.
In theory, all capacitive touchscreens should offer consumers the same experience, but they rarely do. There is a lot of dependency on the software as well in order for the human touch to be effective as it taps the screen. It can make the difference between having the screen react to a light touch or reacting to a heavy tap. Most consumer tests of Smart Phones show that Apple makes the best ones.

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