Did you know Motorola has a Labs team that does cool things and then blogs about them? They're pretty cool like that. Correction: interesting piece of trivia - did you know MOTO Labs actually has nothing to do with Motorola? With a name like MOTO, one could think… well never mind, I apologize for the mistake.

The Finger Test

For example, in January they tested the screens on 4 flagship mobile phones by swiping a finger across the screen in a drawing app and recording the resulting patterns, complete with photos and a video.

The phones in the first test were:

  • Apple iPhone
  • HTC Droid Eris
  • Motorola Droid
  • Google Nexus One

The iPhone won with the straightest lines (no surprise here - the iPhone screen feels like butter), Eris and N1 were *kind of* accurate and the Motorola Droid was the most inaccurate. By the way, you guys got balls reviewing your own product a product from a company with a name that can be easily confused for your own and finding it sucks the most out of the whole group.

Here are the finger test results:

Motorola finger test results

Fingers? Pshh - So Inaccurate - Let The Robot Do it

OK, said MOTO and instructed a local robot (what, you don't have robots hanging around your place? Weak.) to perform exactly the same tests, except this time using its robotic fingers and more phones.

The phones in this second test were:

  • Apple iPhone
  • HTC Droid Eris
  • Motorola Droid
  • Google Nexus One
  • Palm Pre
  • Blackberry Storm 2

The robot confirmed, yet again, that the iPhone's screen rocks the socks off all other phones. Nexus One and Eris were still sharing the 2nd place while the Droid, Pre, and Storm 2 were quite mediocre, especially to the light touch. I can definitely attest to that with the Pre and Droid.

Here are the actual results of the second test:

Motorola robot fingers test results

And finally if you want to see how they did it (and I recommend you do because the video is done quite nicely), proceed to the video below:

MOTO - this was way cool, thank you. Now get to work - that Droid is not going to stop having the worst screen all on its own. Yeah… you go teach that Motorola how to make a good screen! Now I'd like to see a survey of how many people think MOTO=Motorola when they first hear about them.