Category: Battery life

News about WebXPRT and BatteryXPRT

on December 7, 2017

Last month, we gave readers a glimpse of the updates in store for the next WebXPRT, and now we have more news to report on that front.

The new version of WebXPRT will be called WebXPRT 3. WebXPRT 3 will retain the convenient features that made WebXPRT 2013 and WebXPRT 2015 our most popular tools, with more than 200,000 combined runs to date. We’ve added new elements, including AI, to a few of the workloads, but the test will still run in 15 minutes or less in most browsers and produce the same easy-to-understand results that help compare browsing performance across a wide variety of devices.

We’re also very close to publishing the WebXPRT 3 Community Preview. For those unfamiliar with our open development community model, BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members have the ability to preview and test new benchmark tools before we release them to the general public. Community previews are a great way for members to evaluate new XPRTs and send us feedback. If you’re interested in joining, you can register here.

In BatteryXPRT news, we recently started to see unusual battery life estimates and high variance when running battery life tests at the default length of 5.25 hours. We think this may be due to changes in how new OS versions are reporting battery life on certain devices, but we’re in the process of extensive testing to learn more. In the meantime, we recommend that BatteryXPRT users adjust the test run time to allow for a full rundown.

Do you have questions or comments about WebXPRT or BatteryXPRT? Let us know!

Justin

Posted in AI, Battery life, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Browser-based benchmarks, Community Preview, Cross-platform benchmarks, Future of performance evaluation, Performance benchmarking, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 3 |

Nothing to hide

By Eric Hale

on November 9, 2017

I recently saw an article in ZDNet by my old friend Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols that talks about how NetMarketShare and StatCounter reported a significant jump in the operating system market shares for Linux and Chrome OS. One frustration Vaughan-Nichols alluded to in the article is the lack of transparency into how these firms calculated market share, so he can’t gauge how reliable they are. Because neither NetMarketShare nor StatCounter disclosed their methods, there’s no sure way for interested observers to verify the numbers. Steven prefers the data from the federal government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP). DAP makes its data freely available, so you can run your own calculations. Transparency generates trust.

Transparency is a core value for the XPRTs. We’ve written before about how statistics can be misleading. That’s why we’ve always disclosed exactly how the XPRTs calculate performance results, and the way BatteryXPRT calculates battery life. It’s also why we make each XPRT’s source code available to community members. We want to be open and honest about how we do things, and our open development community model fosters the kind of constructive feedback that helps to continually improve the XPRTs.

We’d love for you to be a part of that process, so if you have questions or suggestions for improvement, let us know. If you’d like to gain access to XPRT source code and previews of upcoming benchmarks, today is a great day to join the community!

Eric

Posted in Battery life, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Chrome OS, Collaborative benchmark development, What makes a good benchmark? |

Looking for performance clues

By Eric Hale

on October 26, 2017

We’ve written before about how the operating system and other software can influence test scores and even battery life. Benchmarks like the XPRTs provide overall results, but teasing out which factors affect those results may require some detective work. The key is to collect individual data points as evidence to what may be causing performance changes.

The Apple iOS 11 rollout last month is an excellent example of the effect of software on device performance. Angry tweets started almost immediately after the update, claiming that iOS 11 drained device batteries. iPhone users here at PT experienced similar issues. What was the cause of that performance drop? The hardware remained the same. So, did software cause the problem?

Less than a week after the rollout, Mashable published an explanation of possible causes. The article quotes research from mobile security firm Wandera showing that, for the 50,000 “moderate to heavy iPhone and iPad users” in the study, devices running iOS 11 burned through their battery at much faster rates than the same devices running iOS 10. They cite two possible causes:

devices often re-categorize the files stored on them for every new OS install, which may account for some of the battery issues.
many apps are not optimized for iOS 11 yet.

While these explanations make sense, with a little more digging, we could get closer to actually solving the mystery instead of guessing at the causes. After all, it is also possible that people are using iOS 11 differently from iOS 10. So, how could a dedicated sleuth investigate further? Anyone using benchmarks and hands-on testing to sift through various scenarios and configurations could get us closer to solving this mystery and any other software-based performance anomalies. But it’s a daunting task—changing only one variable at a time and recording the results is like pounding the streets and knocking on doors to solve a case.

In all likelihood, some combination of Apple iOS updates and application changes will improve the battery life for iOS 11. In the meantime, we wish we had an XPRT that could test battery life on iOS. Who knows, maybe some future version of WebXPRT will be able to help in future sleuthing.

Eric

Posted in Battery life, Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, iOS, Uncategorized, WebXPRT |

Keeping up with the latest Android news

By Justin Greene

on September 7, 2017

Ars Technica recently published a deep-dive review of Android 8.0 (Oreo) that contains several interesting tidbits about what the author called “Android’s biggest re-architecture, ever.” After reading the details, it’s hard to argue with that assessment.

The article’s thorough analysis includes a list of the changes Oreo is bringing to the UI, notification settings, locations service settings, and more. In addition to the types of updates that we usually see, a few key points stand out.

Project Treble, a complete reworking of Android’s foundational structure intended to increase the speed and efficiency of update delivery
A serious commitment to eliminating silent background services, giving users more control over their phone’s resources, and potentially enabling significant gains in battery life
Increased machine learning/neural network integration for text selection and recognition
A potential neural network API that allows third-party plugins
Android Go, a scaled-down version of Android tuned for budget phones in developing markets

There’s too much information about each of the points to discuss here, but I encourage anyone interested in Android development to check out the article. Just be warned that when they say “thorough,” they mean it, so it’s not exactly a quick read.

Right now, Oreo is available on only the Google Pixel and Pixel XL phones, and will not likely be available to most users until sometime next year. Even though widespread adoption is a way off, the sheer scale of the expected changes requires us to adopt a long-term development perspective.

We’ll continue to track developments in the Android world and keep the community informed about any impact that those changes may have on MobileXPRT and BatteryXPRT. If you have any questions or suggestions for future XPRT/Android applications, let us know!

Justin

Posted in Android, Android O, Battery life, Google, Machine learning, Mobile devices, MobileXPRT, Open Source, Phones | Tagged Android, BatteryXPRT, MobileXPRT, Oreo |

Notes from the lab

By Justin Greene

on June 15, 2017

This week’s XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight featured the Alcatel A30 Android phone. We chose the A30, an Amazon exclusive, because it’s a budget phone running Android 7.0 (Nougat) right out of the box. That may be an appealing combination for consumers, but running a newer OS on inexpensive hardware such as what’s found in the A30 can cause issues for app developers, and the XPRTs are no exception.

Spotlight fans may have noticed that we didn’t post a MobileXPRT 2015 or BatteryXPRT 2014 score for the A30. In both cases, the benchmark did not produce an overall score because of a problem that occurs during the Create Slideshow workload. The issue deals with text relocation and significant changes in the Android development environment.

As of Android 5.0, on 64-bit devices, the OS doesn’t allow native code executables to perform text relocation. Instead, it is necessary to compile the executables using position-independent code (PIC) flags. This is how we compiled the current version of MobileXPRT, and it’s why we updated BatteryXPRT earlier this year to maintain compatibility with the most recent versions of Android.

However, the same approach doesn’t work for SoCs built with older 32-bit ARMv7-A architectures, such as the A30’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 210, so testers may encounter this issue on other devices with low-end hardware.

Testers who run into this problem can still use MobileXPRT 2015 to generate individual workload scores for the Apply Photo Effects, Create Photo Collages, Encrypt Personal Content, and Detect Faces workloads. Also, BatteryXPRT will produce an estimated battery life for the device, but since it won’t produce a performance score, we ask that testers use those numbers for informational purposes and not publication.

If you have any questions or have encountered additional issues, please let us know!

Justin

Posted in Android, Android N, Battery life, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Benchmarking computing devices, MobileXPRT, MobileXPRT 2015 |

Learning something new every day

By Justin Greene

on June 1, 2017

We’re constantly learning and thinking about how the XPRTs can help people evaluate the tech that will soon be a part of daily life. It’s why we started work on a tool to evaluate machine learning capabilities, and it’s why we developed CrXPRT in response to Chromebooks’ growing share of the education sector.

The learning process often involves a lot of tinkering in the lab, and we recently began experimenting with Neverware’s CloudReady OS. CloudReady is an operating system based on the open-source Chromium OS. Unlike Chrome OS, which can run on only Chromebooks, CloudReady can run on many types of systems, including older Windows and OS X machines. The idea is that individuals and organizations can breathe new life into aging hardware by incorporating it into a larger pool of devices managed through a Google Admin Console.

We were curious to see if it worked as advertised, and if it would run CrXPRT 2015. Installing CloudReady on an old Dell Latitude E6430 was easy enough, and we then installed CrXPRT from the Chrome Web Store. Performance tests ran without a hitch. Battery life tests would kick off but not complete, which was not a big surprise because the battery life calls involved were developed specifically for Chrome OS.

So, what role can CrXPRT play with CloudReady, and what are the limitations? CloudReady has a lot in common with Chrome OS, but there are some key differences. One way we see the CrXPRT performance test being useful is for comparing CloudReady devices. Say that an organization was considering adopting CloudReady on certain legacy systems but not on others; CrXPRT performance scores would provide insight into which devices performed better with CloudReady. While you could use CrXPRT to compare those devices to Chromebooks, the differences between the operating systems are significant enough that we cannot guarantee the comparison would be a fair one.

Have you spent any time working with CloudReady, or are there other interesting new technologies you’d like us to investigate? Let us know!

Justin

Posted in Battery life, Benchmark metrics, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Performance benchmarking |

Category: Battery life

News about WebXPRT and BatteryXPRT

Nothing to hide

Looking for performance clues

Keeping up with the latest Android news

Notes from the lab

Learning something new every day

Check out the other XPRTs: