Phone test online: touch screen, camera, sensors and vibration
A phone can feel fine until you try the one thing that has been bothering you. Start there. This phone test online brings together touch screen, camera, motion sensor and vibration checks that run in your browser, with no app to install.
If typing keeps missing a letter, try the touch grid. If a call starts with a black preview, open the camera test. Working through the symptom is more useful than collecting a page full of numbers. The preview and test readings stay on your device; what the browser can check depends on its permissions and hardware support.
What a browser can check without an app
Touch events carry every contact point the operating system reports, so a page can draw exactly where your finger landed and where it did not. getUserMedia opens the camera and exposes the real stream dimensions. The device-orientation event streams tilt angles many times a second, and navigator.vibrate drives the motor on Android.
Needing no install is the point of a phone test online: you are opening a web page in the thirty seconds before you hand over cash. The panels show raw numbers, not a green PASS badge — that is a claim a browser cannot honestly make.
The four tests and what each one tells you
Each panel isolates one subsystem, and each has its own page with the device-specific quirks and failure patterns.
Touch screen and dead zones
The touch screen test paints a 10 × 15 grid over the screen and fills in every cell your finger crosses. Drag slowly across the whole grid without lifting; cells still empty afterwards are where the digitizer is not responding. A healthy screen reaches 100% coverage and holds a stable maximum point count — ten on most Android flagships, five on iPhones in Safari.
Camera, resolution and frame rate
The camera test online requests a 1920 × 1080 stream and reports the resolution actually delivered plus a live frame rate. Point the phone at a bright white wall: dark blobs that stay put as you move it are dust or damage inside the module. The snapshot button writes a PNG to your downloads.
Motion sensors and the bubble level
The accelerometer test turns orientation data into a bubble level plus three angles: alpha (yaw), beta (pitch) and gamma (roll). On a surface you know is flat, beta and gamma should settle within a degree or two of zero and stay there. A bubble that drifts on a motionless phone means a sensor that needs recalibrating or has failed.
Vibration motor and haptics
The vibration test fires four patterns: a 100 ms pulse, a 500 ms buzz, an 80 ms double tap and an SOS in morse. Hold the phone in your palm rather than on a desk, where the surface masks weak output. A motor that fires only sometimes, rattles or sounds loose has come away from its mount.
Wet speaker grille
If a splash leaves the speaker muffled, the water eject tool plays one short pulsed tone that may help move droplets at the grille. It cannot dry the phone internally or make charging safe, so disconnect cables and let the device air-dry first.
Checking a used phone in five minutes
Run the cheap checks first, because one of them can end the deal before you touch the hardware:
- Dial
*#06#and compare the IMEI with the box or settings. A seller who will not let you run a blacklist lookup is where you walk away. - Battery health. iPhone: Settings → Battery → Battery Health. Recent Android: Settings → Battery → Battery health. Under 80% means a replacement is due.
- Account locks. The iCloud account signed out, or the Google account removed — a locked phone is a paperweight.
- The four browser tests. Touch grid first, in daylight with brightness up: hairline cracks under a screen protector show as a column of dead cells long before you see the crack.
- Buttons and ports. Every button, the charge port with a real cable, both speakers, both cameras.
The honest limits: what the browser cannot do
Every phone test online runs in a sandbox, and the sandbox is the point: a page must ask permission for hardware, the browser can refuse, and some of it is simply unavailable. Read these before concluding a phone is broken.
- Permissions gate everything. The camera needs an explicit grant on an HTTPS page; deny it once and the panel stays black until you clear the site permission. A test that shows nothing at all is usually the prompt, not the hardware.
- iOS blocks vibration outright. WebKit never shipped the Vibration API, and every browser on an iPhone runs on WebKit, so no web page can buzz an iPhone. The panel says the API is unsupported rather than pretending it worked.
- iOS motion sensors need a permission prompt. Since iOS 13 Safari delivers orientation data only after the site asks from a user tap and you approve. The sensor test asks the moment you tap its start button, so angles stuck at 0 / 0 / 0 on an iPhone mean the prompt was declined or dismissed, not a dead sensor.
- Resolution is the stream, not the sensor. The panel asks for 1080p and reports what it got, so a 48-megapixel phone still shows 1920 × 1080. It is not a megapixel count.
- The frame rate is the render loop. It counts browser animation frames while the preview is live, so it is capped by the display refresh rate and drops when you switch tabs. Read it as "is the preview smooth".
- Touch is limited to the canvas. Screen edges, the notch and system gesture strips belong to the OS, so a dead zone in the last few millimetres may never appear. Browsers do not expose touch sampling rate either, so no page can measure a 120 Hz or 240 Hz panel.
- No calibration verdict. A manufacturer self-test compares a sensor against a factory reference and prints pass or fail. The browser only sees the output: it proves a sensor responds, not that its numbers are right.
Dialer test codes, and when they beat a web page
Android makers ship a hidden hardware menu you open from the phone app, and where it exists it goes deeper than any browser: gyroscope self-tests, direct motor control, single sub-pixel fills.
*#06#— the IMEI. Universal, including on iPhones.*#0*#— Samsung test mode: touch, sensors, vibration, speakers, display.*#*#64663#*#*— the CIT hardware test on Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO.
Two warnings. The codes are no longer reliable: Samsung's test mode is swallowed by Auto Blocker, several carrier builds disable it, and codes come and go between One UI versions. And not every code is harmless — some trigger a factory reset with no confirmation, so never type one you have not verified. iPhones have nothing beyond *#06#.
Reading the results: software fault or hardware fault
Try to reproduce the problem before deciding what it means. Restart the phone, clean and dry the screen, then repeat the same action. Change one condition at a time so you can see what made a difference.
A gap that returns in the same place is worth documenting. A problem that appears in one app calls for a comparison with another. Neither observation names the failed part on its own. Keep a note of where the problem happens and what you tried; that is something you can use when asking for help.
Frequently asked questions
What things should I look out for when buying a used phone?
Check the IMEI with *#06# and the account locks first — a blacklisted or iCloud-locked phone cannot be fixed by any amount of haggling. Then battery health, then the hardware: touch grid, both cameras, motion sensors, vibration, every button, the charge port with a real cable, and both speakers. Do the touch test in daylight with brightness up, because hairline cracks show as dead columns before they are visible.
How do I enable motion and orientation access for a website on my iPhone?
There is no global switch any more — since iOS 13 the site has to ask, and you approve a one-off prompt. The request must come from a tap, so press “Start sensor test” on the sensor page rather than waiting for readings to appear. If you dismissed the prompt, reload the page; if it never returns, clear that site's data under Settings → Safari → Advanced → Website Data and open it again.
Why doesn't the vibration test do anything on my iPhone?
Because Safari does not support the Vibration API, and never has. Every browser on iOS — Chrome, Firefox, Edge — is required to use Apple's WebKit engine, so no web page of any kind can drive an iPhone's Taptic Engine. This is a platform restriction, not a fault in your phone. Test the haptics through Settings → Sounds & Haptics, or by ringing the phone with the silent switch on.
My Samsung *#0*# test mode code isn't working — how do I fix it?
Turn off Auto Blocker, then redial. It lives under Settings → Security and privacy → Auto Blocker, and it silently swallows dialer codes on recent One UI builds. If the code still returns an invalid MMI error, the block is coming from the carrier firmware — Verizon and Sprint variants have long disabled it. Use the diagnostics in the Samsung Members app instead, or test the same hardware from this page.
There's a ghost touch in the centre of my display — is the screen dead?
Ghost touches mean the digitizer is registering pressure that is not there, and that is almost always hardware. Drag one finger across the grid: if cells light up where you did not touch, or the live touch count climbs above the number of fingers on the glass, the panel is generating its own input. Remove any screen protector and case, then reboot and retest — that rules out the cheap causes.
How many fingers should my phone's screen register?
Ten on most Android flagships, five on iPhones in Safari, and two to five on budget panels. Put every finger down at once and read the maximum point counter. Remember that the browser only reports what the operating system hands it, so a low number can be a browser limit rather than a broken panel — check the figure against the phone's own diagnostics before treating it as a fault.
There's a black spot in my camera — how do I know if it's faulty?
Point the camera at a bright white wall and move the phone: a spot that stays in the same position on screen is inside the camera, not in the scene. Clean the outer glass first, since smudges and burnt-in grime cause most of these. If it survives a clean, take a snapshot and zoom in on a bigger screen — a fixed dark blot means dust inside the module or sensor damage, and that needs a repair.