Can you spot me?

Have you ever missed a turn on a road or almost got in a car accident because your phones GPS wasn't functioning properly? My family and myself included know this feeling all too well. This week I will be testing how accurate the location services are on each phone, and how quickly and smoothly the app updates your location while driving in a car.

I will be testing at two locations for this test. The first location will be at my house, and the second will be on campus. At my house I will test the location of all the phones in both the front and backyard. While i'm in the front yard I will be roughly 25 feet away from the Wi-fi router, and while i'm in the backyard roughly 50 feet away. I will use campus to test the driving scenario since there are long straight aways that will always allow me to be connected to the schools internet. All tests will be using Google Maps.

Here are the results of the first tests at my house. Pictured are the three phones locations of where it thought I was standing, followed by a photo of my actual location. Unfortunately, however, the quality of the photos being taken from the iPhone of both the Android and Windows phone are too bad (the map photo quality on both phones is too low to get a clear representation of where it thinks I am) so I will be labeling them on a map of my own after I see the location on each phone.

    Windows phone:                                     Actual location:
 

    iPhone:                                                   Android:

    

Windows phone:                                  Actual location:

 

iPhone:                                                 Android phone:

 


As we can see in the photos above, none of the GPS locations from the phone were able to get the exact spot I was standing in. For the backyard the iPhone was the closest, coming within one or two feet, followed by the Windows phone in a close second then the Android phone. For the front yard however, the Android phone was the most accurate followed by the iPhone and then the Windows phone. Since there are discrepancies with these results I cannot conclude what one was more accurate overall.

For the driving test I will not be able to show you visually the results like I did for the ones when I was standing still at my house. This is because it won't show how smoothly the phone updates the location.

For the test we drove along the road that is inside of my schools campus. We maintained a speed of roughly 20 MPH. As I looked at all the phones while the maps were open I could noticeably see a difference in how smooth the map moved across the screen between the three of them. The iPhone updated the location very fast and the map moved smoothly across the screen without it jumping. The next best one was the Android phone. This phone updated only slightly slower than the iPhone, but it had not as smooth of a feeling to it, since the map kept jumping across the screen. The Windows phone was most defiantly the laggiest and updated very slow compared to the other two, and the screen maps jumped a lot as it was moving.

Overall the winner would most likely have to be the iPhone. Although for the standing still test it was not a lot more accurate than the others, it did have the smoothest viewing while moving in a car, which is necessary if you are always using a GPS.

How many clicks does it take?

One thing that many people look for in a phone is how efficient they can be with it. Businessmen as well as other busy individuals want to be able to do whatever the task may be with the fewest amount of clicks. Most likely these individuals will be using other apps off the respective app store the majority of their time, but when it comes to pre-installed tasks (such as connecting to a wifi network or changing your passcode), they would still like to be as efficient as possible.

Connecting to wireless internet can be a frustrating task sometimes, either the phone just doesn't want to connect or some other miscellaneous error occurs. For this test I will be timing how long it takes for me to get from home screen of the phone to the proper location (such as the wifi access screen), and then time how long the phone takes to connect to JCU's guest wifi (network was forgotten prior to each trial on each phone).

Here are the results of the test (each test was preformed 3 times then averaged):

Home screen -> wifi screen (time and number of clicks) :
Apple phone: Time: ~1.2 seconds      Clicks: 2
Android phone: Time: ~2.3 seconds      Clicks: 4
Windows phone: Time: ~2.6 seconds      Clicks: 4

Wifi screen -> actually connected to the wifi:
Apple phone: ~4.1 seconds
Android phone: ~4.7 seconds
Windows phone :  ~ 4.9 seconds

An interesting thing I noticed while conducting these tests is that on each of the three phones under the setting tab, Wireless networks were within the top two options of the given list.

 



This goes to show the the developers did a good job in placing the settings where they are within the phone, by having the most used features on the top of the list and the least used closer to the bottom, it allows for people to become more efficient.

Based on the results above we can see that all the times were too close to call for a clear winner, since the times were so small they could of a large degree of error due to human error(not being quick enough to stop the timer). However, the iPhone offers the fewest amount of clicks so be default it should be the winner.

I will run a few more test right now too so that we can see how long it takes to do other tasks on the phone.

Home screen -> system updates (phone updates screen) (time and number of clicks) :
Apple phone: Time: ~2.3 seconds      Clicks: 3
Android phone: Time: ~2.7 seconds      Clicks: 4
Windows phone: Time: ~2.7 seconds      Clicks: 3

For this test we can see it was a close race again.

Messaging applications -> typing a sentence (time and number of clicks) :
For this test I will be navigating to the texting apps and typing a small 25 word paragraph. This is to test how smoothly the keyboard works and how quickly the phones react to my touches.
Apple phone: Time: ~20 seconds    
Android phone: Time: ~23 seconds    
Windows phone: Time: ~28 seconds  

Windows:                                 Android:                               Apple:

 


Clearly we can see a noticeable difference in the time it took to type the same paragraph. For each trial I went as fast as I could. As we can see from above all the keyboards are the relatively the same layout, which allowed myself to type effectively on each one. The main problem for me was the size of each keyboard however. Since the Windows phone and Android phone have smaller displays, it also causes the keyboard to be smaller by default too. The smallness of the keyboards are what really slowed me down compared to the Apple phone. So if you are one who is constantly always typing then the iPhone may be better for you.