A few weeks ago we shared Agawi’s first touchscreen responsiveness test, which found Apple’s iOS smartphones to be more responsive than the Android competitors. Agawi is back with TouchMarks II, comparing touchscreen latencies in flagship tablets from Apple, Android and Microsoft’s Windows RT platform, and once again Apple seems to have topped rival devices by a healthy margin. Agawi used the same method to test the tablets as it did with the smartphones, “by measuring the time between when the user touches the screen and the device updates the display.”
As the chart below shows, the iPad mini had the quickest Minimum App Response Time (MART) at 75 milliseconds, with the most recent full-size iPad clocking in slightly slower at 81 milliseconds. Agawi was surprised to find that the Nvidia Shield, an Android-based portable gaming device, came in ahead of Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD as well as popular Android tablets from Samsung and Google. The Surface RT also sneaked in ahead of most Android devices.
The report concludes with a recommendation which suggests Android devices for everyone shopping for a tablet on a budget, but if “you’re into latency-sensitive applications like games or interactive music apps, then your best bet might be an iPad.”
