Author Archives: Justin Greene

BatteryXPRT: A quick and reliable way to estimate Android battery life

on May 25, 2017

In the last few weeks, we reintroduced readers to the capabilities and benefits of TouchXPRT and CrXPRT. This week, we’d like to reintroduce BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, an app that evaluates the battery life and performance of Android devices.

When purchasing a phone or tablet, it’s good to know how long the battery will last on a typical day and how often you’ll need to charge it. Before BatteryXPRT, you had to rely on a manufacturer’s estimate or full rundown tests that perform tasks that don’t resemble the types of things we do with our phones and tablets every day.

We developed BatteryXPRT to estimate battery life reliably in just over five hours, so testers can complete a full evaluation in one work day or while sleeping. You can configure it to run while the device is connected to a network or in Airplane mode. The test also produces a performance score by running workloads that represent common everyday tasks.

BatteryXPRT is easy to install and run, and is a great resource for anyone who wants to evaluate how well an Android device will meet their needs. If you’d like to see test results from a variety of Android devices, go to BatteryXPRT.com and click View Results, where you’ll find scores from many different Android devices.

If you’d like to run BatteryXPRT:

Simply download BatteryXPRT from the Google Play store or BatteryXPRT.com. The BatteryXPRT installation instructions and user manual provide step-by-step instructions for how to configure your device and kick off a test. We designed BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android to be compatible with a wide variety of Android devices, but because there are so many devices on the market, it is inevitable that users occasionally run into problems. In the Tips, tricks, and known issues document, we provide troubleshooting suggestions for issues we encountered during development testing.

If you’d like to learn more:

We offer a full online BatteryXPRT training course that covers almost every aspect of the benchmark. You can view the sections in order or jump to the parts that interest you. We guarantee that you’ll learn something new!

If you’d like to dig into the details:

Check out the Exploring BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android white paper. In it, we discuss the app’s development and structure. We also describe the component tests; explain the differences between the test’s Airplane, Wi-Fi, and Cellular modes; and detail the statistical processes we use to calculate expected battery life.

If you’d like to dig even deeper, the BatteryXPRT source code is available to members of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, so consider joining today. Membership is free for members of any company or organization with an interest in benchmarks, and there are no obligations after joining.

If you haven’t used BatteryXPRT before, try it out and let us know what you think!

Justin

Posted in Android, Battery life, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT development community, CrXPRT, TouchXPRT, What makes a good benchmark? |

CrXPRT: a valuable tool for evaluating Chromebooks

By Justin Greene

on May 11, 2017

Last week, we reintroduced readers to TouchXPRT 2016. This week, we invite you to get to know CrXPRT, an app for Chrome OS devices.

When you buy a Chromebook, it’s important to know how long the battery will last on a typical day and how well it can handle everyday tasks. We developed CrXPRT 2015 to help answer those questions. CrXPRT measures how fast a Chromebook handles everyday tasks such as playing video games, watching movies, editing pictures, and doing homework, and it also measures battery life. The performance test, which measures the speed of your Chromebook, gives you individual workload scores and an overall score. The battery life test produces an estimated battery life time, a separate performance score, and a frames-per-second (FPS) rate for a built-in HTML5 gaming component.

CrXPRT completes the battery life evaluation in half a workday, and delivers results you can understand. Before CrXPRT, you had to rely on the manufacturer’s performance claims and estimated battery life. Now, CrXPRT provides an objective evaluation tool that’s easy to use for anyone interested in Chromebooks. To learn more about CrXPRT, check out the links below.

Watch CrXPRT in action:

To test your Chromebook’s performance or battery life:

Simply download CrXPRT from the Chrome Web Store. Installation is quick and easy, and the CrXPRT 2015 user manual provides step-by-step instructions. A typical performance test takes about 15 minutes, and a battery life test will take 3.5 hours once the system is charged and configured for testing. If you’d like to see how your score compares to other Chromebooks, visit the CrXPRT results page.

If you’d like to dig into the details:

Read the Exploring CrXPRT 2015 white paper. In it, we discuss the concepts behind CrXPRT 2015, its development process, and the application’s structure. We also describe the component tests and explain the statistical processes used to calculate expected battery life.

BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members also have access to the CrXPRT source code, so if you’re interested, join today! There’s no obligation and membership is free for members of any company or organization with an interest in benchmarks.

If you have a Chromebook you’d like to evaluate, give CrXPRT a try and let us know what you think!

Justin

Posted in Battery life, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Education, Google Chrome, Performance benchmarking |

Getting to know TouchXPRT

By Justin Greene

on May 4, 2017

Many of our community members first encountered the XPRTs when reading about WebXPRT or MobileXPRT in a device review, using TouchXPRT or HDXPRT in an OEM lab, or using BatteryXPRT or CrXPRT to evaluate devices for bulk purchasing on behalf of a corporation or government agency. They know that specific XPRT provided great value in that context, but may not know about the other members of the XPRT family.

To help keep folks up to date on the full extent of XPRT capabilities, we like to occasionally “reintroduce” each of the XPRTs. This week, we invite you to get to know TouchXPRT.

We developed TouchXPRT 2016 as a Universal Windows Platform app for Windows 10. We wanted to offer a free tool that would provide consumers with objective information about how well a Windows 10 or Windows 10 Mobile laptop, tablet, or phone handles common media tasks. To do this, TouchXPRT runs five tests that simulate the kinds of photo, video, and music editing tasks people do every day. It measures how quickly the device completes each of those tasks and provides an overall score. To compare device scores, go to TouchXPRT.com and click View Results, where you’ll find scores from many different Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile devices.

TouchXPRT is easy to install and run, and is a great resource for anyone who wants to evaluate the performance of a Windows 10 device.

If you’d like to run TouchXPRT:

Simply download TouchXPRT from the Microsoft Store. (If that doesn’t work for you, you can also download it directly from TouchXPRT.com.) Installing it should take about 15 minutes, and the TouchXPRT 2016 release notes provide step-by-step instructions.

If you’d like to dig into the details:

Check out the Exploring TouchXPRT 2016 white paper. In it, we discuss the TouchXPRT development process, its component tests and workloads, and how it calculates individual workload and overall scores. We also provide instructions for automated testing.

BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members also have access to the TouchXPRT source code, so consider joining today. There’s no obligation and membership is free for members of any company or organization with an interest in benchmarks.

If you haven’t tried running TouchXPRT before, give it a shot and let us know what you think!

Justin

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Mobile devices, Performance benchmarking, Performance testing on tablets, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT 2016, TouchXPRT development process, TouchXPRT results |

Thinking ahead to WebXPRT 2017

By Justin Greene

on April 13, 2017

A few months ago, Bill discussed our intention to update WebXPRT this year. Today, we want to share some initial ideas for WebXPRT 2017 and ask for your input.

Updates to the workloads provide an opportunity to increase the relevance and value of WebXPRT in the years to come. Here are a few of the ideas we’re considering:

For the Photo Enhancement workload, we can increase the data sizes of pictures. We can also experiment with additional types of photo enhancement such as background/foreground subtraction, collage creation, or panoramic/360-degree image viewing.
For the Organize Album workload, we can explore machine learning workloads by incorporating open source JavaScript libraries into web-based inferencing tests.
For the Local Notes workload, we’re investigating the possibility of leveraging natural-brain libraries for language processing functions.
For a new workload, we’re investigating the possibility of using online 3D modeling applications such as Tinkercad.

For the UI, we’re considering improvements to features like the in-test progress bars and individual subtest selection. We’re also planning to update the UI to make it visually distinct from older versions.

Throughout this process, we want to be careful to maintain the features that have made WebXPRT our most popular tool, with more than 141,000 runs to date. We’re committed to making sure that it runs quickly and simply in most browsers and produces results that are useful for comparing web browsing performance across a wide variety of devices.

Do you have feedback on these ideas or suggestions for browser technologies or test scenarios that we should consider for WebXPRT 2017? Are there existing features we should ditch? Are there elements of the UI that you find especially useful or would like to see improved? Please let us know. We want to hear from you and make sure that we’re crafting a performance tool that continues to meet your needs.

Justin

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, Browser-based benchmarks, Collaborative benchmark development, Future of performance evaluation, Let us know your thoughts, Machine learning, Performance benchmarking, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2017, What makes a good benchmark? |

Looking under the hood

By Justin Greene

on April 6, 2017

In the next couple of weeks, we’ll publish the source code and build instructions for the latest HDXPRT 2014 and BatteryXPRT 2014 builds. Access to XPRT source code is one of the benefits of BenchmarkXPRT Development Community membership. For readers who may not know, this a good time to revisit the reasons we make the source code available.

The primary reason is transparency; we want the XPRTs to be as open as possible. As part of our community model for software development, the source code is available to anyone who joins the community. Closed-source benchmark development can lead some people to infer that a benchmark is biased in some way. Our approach makes it impossible to hide any biases.

Another reason we publish source code is to encourage collaborative development and innovation. Community members are involved in XPRT development from the beginning, helping to identify emerging technologies in need of reliable benchmarking tools, suggesting potential workloads and improvements, reviewing design documents, and offering all sorts of general feedback.

Simply put, if you’re interested in benchmarking and the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, then we’re interested in what you have to say! Community input helps us at every step of the process, and ultimately helps us to create benchmarking tools that are as reliable and relevant as possible.

If you’d like to review XPRT source code, but haven’t yet joined the community, we encourage you to go ahead and join! It’s easy, and if you work for a company or organization with an interest in benchmarking, you can join the community for free. Simply fill out the form with your company e-mail address and click the option to be considered for a free membership. We’ll contact you to verify the address is real and then activate your membership.

If you have any other questions about community membership or XPRT source code, feel free to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you!

Justin

Posted in BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development, HDXPRT, HDXPRT 2014, Open Source, Source code |

Running Android-oriented XPRTs on Chrome OS

By Justin Greene

on March 30, 2017

Since last summer, we’ve been following Google’s progress in bringing Android apps and the Google Play store to Chromebooks, along with their plan to gradually phase out support for Chrome apps over the next few years. Because we currently offer apps that assess battery life and performance for Android devices (BatteryXPRT and MobileXPRT) and Chromebooks (CrXPRT), the way this situation unfolds could affect the makeup of the XPRT portfolio in the years to come.

For now, we’re experimenting to see how well the Android app/Chrome OS merger is working with the devices in our lab. One test case is the Samsung Chromebook Plus, which we featured in the XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight a few weeks ago. Normally, we would publish only CrXPRT and WebXPRT results for a Chromebook, but installing and running MobileXPRT 2015 from the Google Play store was such a smooth and error-free process that we decided to publish the first MobileXPRT score for a device running Chrome OS.

We also tried running BatteryXPRT on the Chromebook Plus, but even though the installation was quick and easy and the test kicked off without a hitch, we could not generate a valid result. Typically, the test would complete several iterations successfully, but terminate before producing a result. We’re investigating the problem, and will keep the community up to date on what we find.

In the meantime, we continue to recommend that Chromebook testers use CrXPRT for performance and battery life assessment. While we haven’t encountered any issues running MobileXPRT 2015 on Chromebooks, CrXPRT has a proven track record.

If you have any questions about running Android-oriented XPRTs on Chrome OS, or insights that you’d like to share, please let us know.

Justin

Posted in Android, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Google, Google Chrome, MobileXPRT, MobileXPRT 2015, WebXPRT |

Author Archives: Justin Greene

BatteryXPRT: A quick and reliable way to estimate Android battery life

If you’d like to run BatteryXPRT:

If you’d like to learn more:

If you’d like to dig into the details:

CrXPRT: a valuable tool for evaluating Chromebooks

Watch CrXPRT in action:

To test your Chromebook’s performance or battery life:

If you’d like to dig into the details:

Getting to know TouchXPRT

If you’d like to run TouchXPRT:

If you’d like to dig into the details:

Thinking ahead to WebXPRT 2017

Looking under the hood

Running Android-oriented XPRTs on Chrome OS

Check out the other XPRTs: