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Mouse vs Touchscreen - Bullet

#1
Hi all,

I was expecting this topic to be exhausted, but after searching I couldn't find a post on point (cue angry person pointing me at the right post).

I'm not a great bullet player (somewhere 1500 plus if I concentrate), but I have noticed I play massively quicker with a touchscreen.

However, from what I can tell all the best players use a mouse, and get superior speed that way.

I've really worked at using the mouse, adjusting the settings and so on, but I am challenged to physically move the pieces in time to finish a game.

I've got pretty good hand to eye co-ordination (computer games, sports etc), but I've seen the speed at which some top streamers, and I am a zillion times slower, and I can't imagine how it's done.

For example, I see some streamers moving a piece from one end of the board super quick. Or even a simple pawn takes pawn pre-move takes a flick of the wrist to set up.

So I'm wondering whether I will just never have what it takes to use the mouse well, and I am destined to use touchscreen always.

My gut tells me I'm doing something wrong with the mouse side of things, rather than it being my lack of co-ordination.

I'm sure I'll get told I'm wrong - but I can't get anywhere with the mouse and so any helpful suggestions from quick mouse users would be great.

Cheers

Andrew
#4
I'm usually pretty busy, so I generally play whenever I get some downtime. I don't have much control over that, so sometimes I'm on a desktop with a mouse, sometimes on a laptop with a touchpad, and sometimes on a phone with a touchscreen.

First, the obvious, the touchpad is by far the worst. I can play reasonably quickly on it, but not time scramble/premove bonanza fast, so all time scrambles at the end of bullet games are basically losses.

I've found that my speed's pretty similar with mouse and touch, with touch being slightly preferred.

My experience pretty much mirrors what has been said in the academic literature on touchscreen vs mouse for pointing.

Touchscreens are measurably faster for most people, but less accurate because there's no visible indicator of the point on the screen you're pressing (i.e., a cursor), and your finger obscures the point you're trying to touch.

That accuracy issue becomes less and less pronounced the bigger the target, so if you have a decent-sized tablet, the touchscreen should be noticeably faster overall.

On a phone it's more of a mixed bag, since even on the biggest phones the squares are still small enough for the accuracy issues with touchscreens to slow you down a bit, since you'll find yourself touching wrong squares and such.

On my 6.3" phone screen, it's close between a good mouse and touch. On my wife's Ipad 2 (9.7"), touch is just much faster.

With a lot of practice I wouldn't be surprised if the mouse could be faster, but without a lot of practice, touch should be faster if the screen's big enough for the squares to be about finger-size (important note, past a certain size, the touchscreen will be slower, since with the mouse a small movement of the hand can cover large distances on the screen, but touchscreens on large all-in-one computers would require your hand to move all that distance).

Looking at this post, I may have thought about this too much :)
#5
"Looking at this post, I may have thought about this too much :)"

lol
#6
Disabled add-ons on Chrome, has stopped some in-browser input delay. That's helped massively. The difference is narrowing now.

Has anyone invested in a gaming mouse and found it improved things over a standard one?
#7
yeah I have a logitech gaming mouse and it has seriously helped :)
#9
wireless mice tend to be a little slower than mice with cords

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