Nexus One suffers multitouch issues

[fbrdphreak]

http://androidandme.com/2010/03/news/is-multitouch-broken-on-the-nexus-one/

The Nexus One performs perfectly fine when used for pinch zoom implementations, but it struggles in other situations. When two fingers are placed close to each other or they cross the same axix, the data points get flipped. This is a major problem for games that use multitouch and I have experienced them first hand with Polarbit games like ToonWarz.

No problems were experienced when using the same multitouch application on the Motorola Droid. To demonstrate the difference I filmed a quick video.

[Go to site to see video - it's a bit surprising]

As you can see the Droid works as we would expect it, but the Nexus One has bugs throughout the testing. Does the Droid actually feature a better touchscreen or does the Nexus One (which features the newer Android 2.1) have a software bug?

Update: It looks like we have a partial answer to one of the questions. Dianna Hackborn, a Google engineer, posted the following response on the official Android Developers group. It appears the Droid does in fact have a higher quality touch screen and a “fix” for the Nexus One does not look good at this point.

“Sorry I meant exactly what I said: this is how the touch screen hardware on the Nexus One works (which is essentially the same screen as on the G1 and myTouch). The Droid has a sensor from a different manufacturer, with different behavior. Other phones will likewise have different sensors.”

Bummer for the N1 owners. Still, when multitouch becomes an official feature of Android, I can't imagine Google will let it suck like that. This is "their baby."

Plus even if this is a consequence of the capacitive touch sensor, they can at least eliminate the axis switching stuff with software. It won't solve the real problem of the data being FUBAR'd when the touch points are close together, but it will stop you from going OMGWTFBBQ as much.

 

[BigSmooth]

Cyanogen (a prominent Android modding guru) has already posted on xda-developers that there is a framework hack to correct the axis-flipping issue, although he says the points still "stick" or snap to each other when they cross axes.

It seems like this would mostly be an issue only with certain multitouch games. As is, the axis flipping behavior does not affect pinch to zoom usage. That's probably why no one has really brought this up as a major problem until now even though it appears the G1 and MyTouch 3G (and other HTC phones, probably) have the same issue.