All phones are not born equal. Some people seem to believe that the iPhone has a marvelous touch panel. But is this pure marketing BS? Is it Apple fans going overboard? MOTO, a small company supporting the development of high-tech gadgets and products, has created a (rather simple) test to check the precision and comfort of touch panels. It’s very easy: The tester will just draw simple lines on the screen and the software will display what the phone has recognized. Long lines drawn at an angle on the screen should display as such: Long lines.

Then, you apply that to a set of high-end phones: iPhone, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One (the most prominent product on this mobile market). Of course, there is a difference if you press very lightly or if you push significantly on the screen with your finger.

Light finger touch

Light pressure

Medium pressure

Medium pressure

All in all, it seems quite obvious that the iPhone has a strong advance in terms of sensitivity (light touch) while the HTC and Nexus One (HTC apparently designed this phone for Google) are quite good if you accept to press a little more.

So, Apple is not only marketing the iPhone through the roof; They also have a very good product and this explains (in part, at least) that the customers are so happy with the man-machine interface.
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This is difficult to stop a big chunk of a plane like the Airbus A380. Let’s see what happens to brakes when tested at maximum braking stress.

YouTube video link

The age-old Acid3 test is a small (but challenging) test of the compatibility of web browsers. Very few of them are able to even display something remotely similar to the expected result. But things changed a lot recently with a few important news:

• On March 26, Opera was announced to be the very first browser to succeed to obtain a 100/100 or 100% test score.
• Safari 3.1 is the first non-beta release of Safari for Windows (usually Safari is available on Mac OsX). While it is still unfinished, it reached the imposing 100% score only a few days after Opera.
• Internet Explorer 8 which is still in closed beta has been said to be able to pass the test, then not to, then again. It seems that Microsoft has the code for a 100% score but feels it should not be the default operation of its future browser.

Reference: The Acid3 test page.