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Exclusive: Apple iPhone 5 touchscreen glitch discovered by developer, we go hands-on

The Apple iPhone 5 for all intents and purposes is one of the most well put together iPhones to date. Sure Apple Maps has rubbed many people up the wrong way but the underlying hardware has proved itself to be highly reliable, or is it?

Apple iPhone 5 Touchscreen glitch

We came across a tweet from UK-based games developers CMA Megacorp, who made mention of an issue they’d encountered with Apple’s iPhone 5. The glitch which as far as we’re aware hasn’t previously been spotted by anyone, manifests itself as a dropout of touch input when quickly scrolling diagonally across the screen.

To put the possible issue to the test we lined up all the iPhones we had in our office: two iPhone 4S’s one running iOS 6.0 and one running iOS 6.0.1, alongside two iPhone 5’s, again one running iOS 6 and the other 6.0.1. Using the Mail app to clearly demonstrate the quick scrolling action, we dragged our finger back and forth diagonally from bottom right to top left on each phone’s display. Sure enough, whilst both iPhone 4S’s handled the fast paced scrolling to aplomb, one iPhone 5 struggled to hold its concentration, dropping and picking back up touch input whilst the other stopped registering input altogether.

We’re unsure whether this is a result of iOS issues unique to the iPhone 5 or it’s something inherent in the touch-based layer of the iPhone’s display, but it’s certainly there. In daily use, this action might not seem like such a problem, but the issue was spotted by a games developer and mobile games are no strangers to quick swipes and touch input. The popular mobile game Fruit Ninja features instances with quick successive swipes and for users to lose out on a high score due to software or hardware instabilities wouldn’t reflect badly on the developers or Apple.

We’ve approached Apple to see if they have a statement on the possible source of this issue and whether or not it has a quick fix.

Read our Apple iPhone 5 review 

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