Touch Screen Test

Check every part of your touchscreen right in the browser: see how many fingers it tracks, sweep the glass to find dead zones, and catch the phantom touches a failing digitizer invents.

Run it on the device you are testing. Clean the glass first, and take off any case that overlaps the edges.

How to Test a Touchscreen

Two checks catch almost every touchscreen fault: how many fingers the screen follows, and whether it follows them everywhere. Both run in the browser, on the device you are testing, with nothing to install.

The multi-touch view

Put your fingers on the screen and each contact gets a circle, a number and a live readout of its position and contact size. Move them around and the trail behind each finger shows how smoothly the screen follows: a healthy panel draws a clean line, a failing one jumps, stutters or drops the contact halfway. Lift a finger and its circle should disappear immediately.

Finding dead zones

A digitizer rarely fails all at once. It loses a band, a corner or a strip along one edge, and everything else keeps working — which is why the fault is so easy to miss until you land on the wrong key. The grid test turns that into something you can see: sweep the whole screen and any tile that stays dark never reported your finger. Sweep slowly, and go over the edges twice, since that is where damage usually starts.

Ghost touches

A dying digitizer starts reporting touches nobody made: the keyboard types by itself, apps open, a menu flicks past. The multi-touch view counts every contact that appears and disappears too fast to be a real tap, so you can leave the test open, not touch the screen, and see whether the number climbs on its own. A few counts while you are actively tapping mean nothing — it is the ones that arrive while your hands are off the glass that matter.

How many fingers should it track?

Almost every modern phone and tablet tracks at least five fingers, and many handle ten. Windows laptops with a touchscreen usually manage ten as well. The number the browser reports is shown under the start button, and the test shows how many the screen actually delivers at the same time — those two can differ when a digitizer is failing. Anything below five on a recent device is worth a closer look.

What to try when part of the screen is dead

Start with the cheap causes. Wipe the glass and dry your hands — water and grease scatter the touch signal. Take off the screen protector, especially a thick or badly fitted one, and any case that presses on the edges. Restart the device, then check for a system update. If the dead area survives all of that, and it always sits in the same place, the digitizer or its ribbon connector is damaged and the panel needs replacing.

Why a laptop trackpad can't be tested

The trackpad under your keyboard is invisible to this test, and to every other web page. The operating system turns its gestures into a mouse cursor before the browser ever sees them, so there is nothing to measure: no coordinates, no contact count, no second finger. If your trackpad is misbehaving, the answer is in the system settings and the driver, not in a browser test.

Testing the whole display?
Resolution, refresh rate, color depth and every other display check in one place.
Open the screen test
The picture looks wrong too?
Fill the screen with solid colors and find the pixels that stopped working.
Run the dead pixel test

Frequently asked questions

Open this page on the device you want to check, press "Start multi-touch test" and put several fingers on the screen — each one should get its own circle that follows it smoothly. Then switch to the dead zone grid and sweep the whole surface until every tile turns green. Tiles that stay dark are the parts of the screen that never answered.
A dead zone is an area where the digitizer — the touch-sensing layer above the display — no longer registers contact. The picture underneath is usually perfect, which is what makes it confusing: the screen looks fine, but one band or corner ignores every tap. It comes from a drop, a bend, water damage or a loose ribbon connector inside.
Touches you never made. The screen reports contacts on its own, so text types itself, apps open and menus flick past while nobody is holding the device. Leave the multi-touch test open without touching anything: if the ghost counter climbs on its own, the digitizer is faulty. A charger with poor grounding is the one common cause you can fix yourself — unplug it and try again.
No, and no other web page can either. The system converts trackpad gestures into ordinary mouse movement before the browser sees them, so there is no touch data left to measure. This test only works with a real touchscreen — a phone, a tablet, or a laptop or monitor whose glass you touch directly.
Most phones and tablets made in the last decade track five fingers, and many track ten; touchscreen laptops usually track ten. The start screen shows the limit your browser reports, and the multi-touch view shows how many contacts the screen really delivers at once. If a device that should handle ten stops at two or three, the digitizer is not healthy.
It means the browser found no touch-sensing hardware — normal on a desktop computer or a laptop without a touchscreen. Both tests still run with a mouse, which is useful for checking a drawing tablet or just for a look around. If the device does have a touchscreen and still reports zero, check that the touch driver is installed and enabled in the system settings.
Sometimes. Clean the glass, remove the screen protector and the case, restart the device, and install any pending system update — a surprising number of "dead" areas come back after that. A zone that survives all of it is physical damage to the digitizer or its connector, and the fix is a repair shop replacing the panel. Back the device up before handing it over.
Yes. Everything happens in your browser: nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and there is no app to install. The test runs the same on Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows and any touchscreen monitor with a browser.