One of the biggest problems with launching a brand new smartphone and a brand new company is the sheer complexity of phones nowadays. There are many components to each phone, and each component must sing in harmony with the other components, or else you’re going to start having some serious issues. In the past month there have been threads and questions popping up all over the Internet about multi-touch issues with the OnePlus One. When I reviewed the phone back in late June/early July, I never came across any issues with the touch screen or any kind of multi-touch bugs. About the biggest issue I could find was the HDR mode, which is essentially broken in all but a choice few situations. Two or Three weeks ago I started noticing that I was having difficulty typing on the phone, and switching keyboards didn’t seem to fix the issue. I quickly found out that I wasn’t alone in this problem, as the most recent update from CyanogenMod, version 33R, was just released last Friday and it was supposed to address the multi-touch bugs that people were having.
Except it didn’t, or at least didn’t fully. Some users have reported that it’s better after the update, and some that it’s worse. So what gives? People have been searching for answers for a few weeks now, and while the assumption was that there was some sort of engineering flaw in the phone or that it could be a grounding issue, all of the tricks that people came up with to fix the problem haven’t worked at all. This isn’t a CyanogenMod problem, it’s a One problem. Just a few hours ago OnePlus sent two techs onto Reddit to answer an AMA, or Ask me Anything, and of course one of the first questions that came up was the touch screen issue many people have been facing lately. The best part here is that OnePlus actually responded to the question instead of dodging it as many have felt they’ve done lately.
The problem stems from the Synaptics digitizer used in the phone, which takes the electrical impulses from your fingers and turns them into touch points on the phone. Something appears to be wonky in the firmware of this digitizer, and now OnePlus is officially acknowledging that it’s not only a problem but that they are working with Synaptics to issue a fix as soon as possible. There’s no ETA, which is painful for those of us having the issue, but the temporary fix for now seems to be turning off the Adaptive Backlight setting found under display settings. Personally this has made a world of difference for me, and while I’m still having the multi-touch issue I’m not having as much trouble typing anymore. It sucks when something like this pops up, but having the company acknowledge the situation and letting us know that they’re working on it is truly a fantastic thing.