iPhone 5 facing touch recognition issues

When Apple designed the iPhone 5, one major goal of the company was to make it extremely slim. It appears that this skinniness has come at a price. Various reports now claim that the iPhone 5 and iPod touch devices respond oddly to multiple and rapid diagonal swipes.

A report by iMore states that on an iPhone 4S, one can rapidly swipe back and forth and the handset will keep up without any lag noticed even when some swipes are diagonal. However, on an iPhone 5, when one swipes rapidly diagonally at about 45 degrees, it appears that the gesture is not recognized.

The author at iMore, Rene Ritchie states, “I was able to reproduce the behavior on an iPhone 5 with Mail.app, Contacts.app, and Tweetbot (though a couple of times in Tweetbot rapid diagonal swiping worked fine for without any drop off), Brushes (paint strokes stopped appearing), the iMore app, and more. I was also able to reproduce the same behavior on an iPod touch 5 using the same apps. Various devices were running iOS 6, iOS 6.0.1, and iOS 6.1 beta. That means it’s not restricted to one control, like UITableView, or one version of iOS 6.”

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Ritchie tried the same gesture on an iPhone 4S, and a fourth generation iPad but the same issue did not arise.

This issue may be due to the in-cell technology used in Apple’s new 4-inch devices along with the software. The report ends by stating, “Due to the angle, rapidity, and consistency needed to trigger the drop, it’s not a problem most apps or developers will ever face. Games and game developers on the other hand, could well encounter it.”

This is not the first problem occuring in the handset. Another well documented problem is the purple haze issue that is seen in certain images captured with the iPhone 5’s camera. Apple had issued a statement which said, “Most small cameras, including those in every generation of iPhone, may exhibit some form of flare at the edge of the frame when capturing an image with out-of-scene light sources. This can happen when a light source is positioned at an angle (usually just outside the field of view) so that it causes a reflection off the surfaces inside the camera module and onto the camera sensor. Moving the camera slightly to change the position at which the bright light is entering the lens, or shielding the lens with your hand, should minimize or eliminate the effect.”

A report by DP Review stated that the most likely cause of the iPhone 5’s purple haze is probably lens flare and internal reflections in the camera lens assembly. They state, “All lenses are succeptable to lens flare to some degree, the iPhone 4S isn’t immune either (ditto the iPhone 4 and competitive smartphones from other manufacturers)." But while shooting with the iPhone 5 it is a lot more noticeable. They state, “It’s unlikely that the flare is solely due to the much-vaunted inclusion of a sapphire glass lens cover (although the refractive index of the sapphire glass is different to conventional optical glass, so it could be a contributing factor). Our money is on it being caused by a combination of different things, none of which, alone, is unique to the iPhone 5.”