Potential iPhone 5 Touchscreen Bug Discovered

It appears there’s a new problem with the iPhone 5 and it involves the handset’s touch input recognition capabilities. A developer has discovered that diagonal scrolling confuses the handset in certain circumstances, causing the screen to drop out and even freeze.

British game developer CMA Megacorp wrote on Twitter, “iPhone 5 touch screen bug? Slide finger back and forth diagonally on screen, input events drop out or stop altogether.” Hardware review site Recombu caught wind of the alleged glitch and sourced four iPhone handsets, two 4S units and two of the latest iPhone 5s. They took the lot for a spin and concluded that CMA Megacorp were right. According to the video they published on YouTube, the iPhone 5 does seem to exhibit strange behavior during rapid finger swiping on the diagonal. As the testers themselves point out, this shouldn’t pose too many problems for regular use, but it could turn out to be a serious issue for games such as Fruit Ninja, which requires gamers to perform a lot of diagonal swiping.

Truth be told, we haven’t been able to replicate the so-called bug on our own iPhone 5 test unit. Which supports the theory that said glitch may be hardware-related. Though it might occur in isolated cases, Recombu showed that both their iPhone 5 test units exhibited the strange behavior. Which is not very reassuring. To make matters clear, a software bug is much easier to cope with both for the consumer and for Apple. Should this theory prove to be correct, expect iOS 6.1 to patch it up. Since we’re on the subject, we’d like to draw attention to an issue we’ve experienced that might be related to this supposed flaw.

In our extensive tests with the iPhone 5’s touchscreen, we’ve been able to notice that the handset often fails to respond to touch outright. The most noticeable such scenarios involved simple On/Off toggling of functions like Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, and Cellular networking. While this may well be limited to our handset, we’re curious to learn about other people’s experience with the iPhone 5. The comments await below.

iPhone test
Image credits to Recombu.com

The iPhone 5 has for the most part proved that the hardware and software at work are robust and efficient. Sure Apple Maps has caused people discomfort but as a slim, crafted smartphone, it's still on of the best. Be that as it may, game developers CMA Megacorp tweeted and posted on Facebook a glitch they'd encountered with no previous reports of it having existed so we had to check it out for ourselves. Using the two iPhone 4Ss on the most recent versions of iOS and the same split on two iPhone 5s, we testing the theory that the diagonal scrolling input drops out on the newer handsets at high speed. The problem is exacerbated by scrolling diagonally and as you can see only occurs on the iPhone 5s. We're unsure if this is iOS-based or an iPhone 5 hardware issue, but you can found out more on the matter at: http://recombu.com/mobile/news/iphone-5-scroll-glitch_M18548.html

See the original tweet here: https://twitter.com/CMA_Megacorp/status/266870789599531008
Video credits to recombu

Posted in: Mobile Phone, Review