Question: Why does the iPhone still have the best touchscreen in the industry?

I don’t have an iPhone. And I’m happy with my other devices. But while I laugh at AT&T issues, mock iPhone users for lacking features I have on Android, and so on, there has always been one thing I’ve been desperately jealous of: the touchscreen.

Now, I’ve had my share of touchscreens of all sizes and shapes. I’ve demoed phones and devices of varying quality for years. And somehow, Apple got themselves a better touchscreen in 2007 than any other company in the world has been able to buy or develop in the succeeding three years. Are you kidding me?

I guess I’m a little bitter about it. I mean, seriously. It’s kind of an indictment of the industry, isn’t it? Years now they’ve had to match it in terms of responsiveness and accuracy, and no one has hit it. This little informal test really draws out the issue. The Droid and Nexus One, flagship phones for the competition, completely fail where a years-old device excels. It boggles the mind!

And this isn’t just a rhetorical question. It’s a serious question that HTC, RIM, and everyone else should be asking themselves, and probably have been. Literally years after a device is introduced, with touchscreen technology advanced (one imagines), higher-resolution screens, and vastly improved processors and other components, no one in the industry has matched that device. The original iPhone, to say nothing of the 3G and 3GS, lets you point more quickly and precisely than phones coming out this week! This is a genuine mystery, my friends.

You would think that by now, someone would have thought to put together a phone with similar components and carefully fit the software so that it worked as well. But no! Even phones like the Storm and Nexus One, where the hardware and software were designed for one another, can’t stand up to the iPhone. That’s pretty embarrassing, guys! And I can’t imagine there’s a good excuse. It’s not like the iPhone uses unicorn tears as conductive lubricant or something.

The only thing I can think of is that these other companies think it doesn’t matter. That’s really the only explanation. Otherwise they would certainly have matched or exceeded its performance, you know, some time in the last few years they’ve had to do the R&D. Well, if that’s the case, then they’re blowing it in more ways than one. I exhort all them to get their collective shit together and make something that doesn’t fail miserably when compared to retired hardware.

Whether it’s buying a better screen, working more closely with the UI designers, or inventing something from scratch, it needs to happen, because the rest of the industry has been getting schooled for way too long at this point. Step up, guys.

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