^^ EXACTLY. This AC knows what's up.

Hi Everyone,

Morgan here from MOTO. Yep, I'm the guy in the video.

Just wanted to chime in and say thanks to everyone for all the good points raised here!
Believe it or not, the level of discourse on this site is head and shoulders above the rest of the web in terms of civility, thoughtfulness, and of course, cute snarky humor :)

We're quite aware that this is a very primitive test, and does not fully characterize anything.
It's intended as a DIY-means-Do-It-Yourself test for people to get a feel for this stuff in the field, and not much more.
Certainly not journal-quality scientific analysis!

There's been a lot of spin applied by the various blog outlets. Don't worry about that nonsense.

We don't mean to puff the iPhone, or to put anyone else down specifically -- we're just trying to demonstrate that there are very real differences in behavior for each of these devices, and that the integration of this behavior is critical in shipping a really high quality product.
Full Disclosure: MOTO is a product development consultancy, and we sell our services in this industry. I've been doing this touch stuff for the better part of 10 years.
It's definitely in our best interest to show the manufacturers how they can improve, and to try to drive consumers to *demand* better performance.

Anyway, we of course have much more quantitative methods for our actual production work -- there's even an XYZ+pressure digitizer robot behind me in the video -- but this story was about the hands-on approach.

Hope it was at least entertaining/informative!

On a personal note, I have absolutely no allegiance to any of these manufacturers, devices, ecosystems, or otherwise. I'm a luddite rational secular humanist Freedom wonk.
Nobody pays us to put these stories up. We can't talk about most of our project work because it's condfidential to our clients -- this is a good way for us to share what we do without exposing anything proprietary, while at the same time driving people to ask the manufacturers for better performance in the future..
We'll put up some more quick tests with other phones as people send them to us.
On my list are the Pre, HD2, and a few others. We won't bother with resistive until I've devised a more interesting set of tests to show the advantages and disadvantages of resistive (analog, digital scanned a la Stantum, hybrid a la TouchCo) versus capacitive. Rich stuff.

Next time I might even spend some time to wake the robot up for some testing :)

You'll all be happy to know that the major touch IC vendors have stuff in the pipeline which will provide better multitouch and much better performance in the next year.
The silicon in these devices (except the iPhone (I find performance to differ little between 3G and 2G)) is all at least a year behind the state of the art.
It's a good year to be an interface nerd.

Thanks for all the feedback!

morgan

The "Why" here is all about the read/write speeds of Flash memory... It's just not particularly fast.

Flash memory doesn't "Blit" 512Mbytes over to RAM in a matter of milliseconds. More like a matter of minutes.

And since the HDD already exists, you can just write your RAM to it a la "hibernate" and accomplish the same thing. Plus, your HDD doesn't have wear-levelling issues, and is already part of the PC, and costs orders of magnitude less. Try booting an embedded Linux system that has to pull its rootfs from NAND Flash. Takes for freaking EVER. All the embedded Linux routers out there use NOR for this reason. But NOR parts are slow to write, and aren't even manufactured in densities above about 32 Mbyte last I designed with them.

With HDD read/write speeds at Gb/s, there's just not much advantage. MRAM, if it ever makes it to these scales, would be a real boon -- you could execute straight out of it. NAND Flash is too slow for that.

If you're concerned about the time it takes to write the RAM image to HDD, you could try writing it continually, on-the-fly as you compute, but that seems like a recipe for disaster... eek.