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Here’s why typing on Android phones is harder than typing on an iPhone

Updated Dec 19th, 2018 8:43PM EST
iPhone Android Touch Screen Comparison

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With occasionally unreliable autocorrect software and periodically clumsy fingers, typing on a virtual keyboard has never been easy. Take these issues and couple them with slow response time, and it’s no wonder so many of our text messages end up riddled with errors. Cloud gaming company Agawi wanted to know which phones responded the fastest, and so the company set up a series of benchmarks (called TouchMarks) to measure touch responsiveness.

The first study measured the Minimum App Response Time (MART) on the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, Galaxy S4, Lumia 928, HTC One and Moto X. The three Android devices and the Windows Phone all had a MART between 114-123 milliseconds, whereas Apple’s iPhone 4S came in at 85 milliseconds and the iPhone 5 took just 55 milliseconds to respond. In other words, the iPhone 5 is more than twice as responsive as the newest Android and Windows Phone devices.

Agawi notes that several factors could come into play when testing latency, such as touchscreen hardware and different methods of coding. Regardless, the iPhone is likely the most responsive phone on the market, although with so much new hardware on the way from every phone company around the globe, the margin may start shrink soon.

Jacob Siegal
Jacob Siegal Associate Editor

Jacob Siegal is Associate Editor at BGR, having joined the news team in 2013. He has over a decade of professional writing and editing experience, and helps to lead our technology and entertainment product launch and movie release coverage.