Category: Education

CrXPRT: a valuable tool for evaluating Chromebooks

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 |

A new reality

By Eric Hale

on February 23, 2017

A while back, I wrote about a VR demo built by students from North Carolina State University. We’ve been checking it out over the last couple of months and are very impressed. This workload will definitely heat up your device! While the initial results look promising, this is still an experimental workload and it’s too early to use results in formal reviews or product comparisons.

We’ve created a page that tells all about the VR demo. As an experimental workload, the demo is available only to community members. As always, members can download the source as well as the APK.

We asked the students to try to build the workload for iOS as a stretch goal. They successfully built an iOS version, but this was at the end of the semester and there was little time for testing. If you want to experiment with iOS yourself, look at the build instructions for Android and iOS that we include with the source. Note that you will need Xcode to build and deploy the demo on iOS.

After you’ve checked out the workload, let us know what you think!

Finally, we have a new video featuring the VR demo. Enjoy!

Eric

Posted in Application-based benchmarks, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development, Education, Future of performance evaluation, Mobile devices, North Carolina State University, Virtual reality, VR Demo, What makes a good benchmark? |

Side by side

By Eric Hale

on August 11, 2016

We’re making a big upgrade to the Spotlight: It will now let you make side-by-side comparisons of any of the devices we’ve featured. You’ll also be able to filter devices by type.

We’ve also added pricing information to the Spotlight. The price of a device can vary a lot, depending on the options you select. We give you the price we paid for the device as we tested it. Because prices can vary over time, we also give the date when we bought the device.

We think these changes will make the Spotlight an even more powerful tool for helping with buying decisions.

We also created a special page, the Back to School Roundup. It provides side-by-side comparisons of 13 of the hottest devices to help families and students choose the right ones for their educational needs. We include a range of device types—all-in-ones, Chromebooks, convertibles, laptops, and tablets—and operating systems—Chrome OS, OS X, and Windows.

Going forward, we’ll be adding more advanced querying features. Of course, we’ll also add new devices every week.

Check it out! And, if you have any ideas about how to make the XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight more useful, let us know!