As we mentioned last week, the Samsung debuted the Galaxy S4 this past week. It seems to have hit all the expectations – including eye-scrolling. Looking at the reviews, it’s somewhere between the greatest phone ever made and something not quite as good as the iPhone. I’m looking forward to seeing one for myself and hoping someone submits a WebXPRT score for it soon.
We’ll be releasing the HDXPRT 2013 design document tomorrow. As we’ve said, the number one comment has been that HDXPRT 2012 is too big and takes too long to run. We have put a lot of thought into how to trim HDXPRT 2013 and still keep the essential value of the benchmark. We’ve also received some other good feedback that we’re incorporating, such as making installing and running HDXPRT scriptable.
We’ve been doing some investigation during the RFC period, and we’ve encountered problems scripting some of the applications, notably iTunes and PowerDirector. We’re working to overcome these problems but if they prove to be insurmountable, we might have to change the list of applications.
Again, thanks to everyone who commented on the HDXPRT 2013 RFC.
We’ve learned that some WebXPRT users in mainland China are having problems with very slow downloads. The good news is that results from the runs are valid. However, we understand that this is frustrating and are investigating solutions. If you are in China and have experienced slow downloads, please send an e-mail to benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com. We would like your help in evaluating any solutions we come up with.
Speaking of WebXPRT, over the next few weeks we’ll be releasing several white papers that look at WebXPRT results in more depth. The first paper will explain the WebXPRT confidence interval and how it relates to run to run variability, which has been confusing to a number of people. The second paper will look at the effect on the browser on WebXPRT scores. The third paper will look at the influence of the operating system.
Eric
