Category: Mobile devices

Airborne

on November 17, 2016

I’m old enough that I’ve never really understood the whole selfie thing. However, it’s clearly never going away, and I’m fascinated–although a little creeped out–by the development of selfie drones. It’s amazing that we have so quickly reached the point where you can buy a drone that will literally fit in your pocket.

As an example of how sophisticated these devices can be, consider Zero Robotics Hover Camera Passport. It’s capable of capturing 4K UHD video and 13-megapixel images, it can track faces or bodies, and it includes sensors, including sonar, to measure the distance from air to ground. All in a package that’s about the size of an old VHS tape.

A while back we talked about the new ways people are finding to use technology, and how the XPRTs need to adapt. While I don’t think we’re going to be seeing DroneXPRT any time soon, we’ve been talking about including the technologies that make these devices possible in the XPRTs. These technologies include machine learning, computer vision, and 4K video.

What new devices fascinate you? Which technologies are going to be most useful in the near future? Let us know!

Eric

Posted in computer vision, Drones, IoT, Machine learning, Mobile devices | Tagged 4K video |

Sleep studies

By Justin Greene

on May 12, 2016

Last week, we discussed the increasing complexity of power options in Android 6.0. Features such as Doze and App Standby have changed the way that the operating system manages app activity, and the wide array of UI skins used by many vendors ensures that the steps needed for pre-test configuration differ considerably from device to device.

Managing Android’s Doze feature is critical to getting a good BatteryXPRT score. To show how involved this process can be, we thought it might be helpful to present the steps for one device. Below my sig are the configuration steps we used for the Huawei Mate 8, which we recently featured in the XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight. For other phones we’ve tested, the steps have been quite different. We’re working on distilling our experience for our tips and tricks document, and the updated version of the document will be available soon. If you have any useful tips, please let us know.

Justin

Whitelist BatteryXPRT (there are two ways to do this)
1) Access Battery manager from Settings/Advanced settings or from the Phone Manager app on the home screen.
2) Select Protected apps.
3) Use the toggles beside BatteryXPRT and BatteryXPRT Tests to allow them to keep running after the screen turns off.

Configure sleep settings
1) Open Settings from the home screen.
2) Select Display.
3) Select Sleep.
4) Select Never. This may reset to a default setting on its own. In our case, it reset to 10 minutes.

Configure screen lock settings
1) Open Settings from the home screen.
2) Select Advanced settings.
3) Select Security.
4) Scroll to the bottom of the list and use the toggle to turn off Screen lock. This keeps the device screen from locking after standby periods during the test.

Posted in Android M, Android N, Battery life, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Benchmarking, Mobile devices, Power consumption |

Staying awake

By Eric Hale

on May 5, 2016

Android developers continue to respond to user demands for longer battery life. Android 6 brought a number of enhancements to improve battery life, and Android N promises even more! Device makers often add device-specific options in their customized UIs, which means the options can differ greatly from device to device. A power-conscious user has a lot more control, but with that control comes complexity.

Not that long ago, preparing a device to run BatteryXPRT was simple: turn off automatic updates, kill unnecessary backgrounds apps, and set the screen to stay awake for at least 30 minutes. That’s still the case for many devices. However, it’s often much more complex. You may have to whitelist BatteryXPRT to keep Android from killing it when the device is in standby. Always-on features may interfere with standby. Security lock timers can override screen-timeout settings for the display – and the list goes on.

We’ve been testing a lot of devices and taking notes. In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be updating the BatteryXPRT Tips and Tricks document to reflect what we’ve learned. If you’ve encountered any of these issues, we’d love to add your tips to the list, so please send them our way!

Eric

Posted in Android, Android M, Android N, Battery life, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Benchmarking, Mobile devices, Power consumption |

IDF16 Shenzhen

By Bill Catchings

on April 14, 2016

I just spent the last couple of days at IDF16 Shenzhen. It was a great opportunity to talk to folks about the XPRTs, see some future technology demos, and think about the future of the XPRTs.

The technology and product demos included lots of interesting technology. I saw everything from the latest computers to games to VR to body monitoring.

Of particular interest to me were the future-looking technologies beyond the usual array of notebooks, tablets, and servers. I was able to see drones that could video a person by following them, while avoiding obstacles such as trees. I saw a number of demos using the Oculus Rift. I got to see some robot demos that were impressive in their use of the fairly off-the-shelf technology driving them. I would have had myself scanned and then had a small 3D model of myself printed, but I was pressed for time and the line was too long.

I was particularly interested in a mirror that could scan a person and tell things about their health. I also found somewhat amusing a technology demo that was able to “beautify” a person in real time for use with teleconferencing such as Skype. While I might quibble about the definition of beautify, the idea of real-time video enhancement is intriguing. (Given the raw material I gave it to work with, it was no easy task to accomplish!) Maybe I won’t need to shave before my next WebEx meeting…

All of these technologies give some hints as to areas the XPRTs may go in the future. While I don’t think we are quite ready for BeautificationXPRT, there may well be some workloads we should consider such as path finding, real-time video enhancement, health monitoring, virtual reality, and gaming. Please let us know your thoughts about what near-term technologies we should be considering in future workloads.

We definitely have exciting times still ahead of us in technology and the XPRTs!

Bill

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, Future of performance evaluation, IDF, Internet of things, IoT, Mobile devices, Performance of computing devices, Virtual reality |

Mobile World Congress 2016 and the need for more

By Mark Van Name

on February 25, 2016

Nothing shows you how much more bandwidth we need than a techie trade show like Mobile World Congress 2016. No matter how much the show’s organizers made available, the attendees swamped it with data from their many devices—phones, tablets, and PCs.

This show also demonstrated that we’re going to need a lot more of something else: device performance.

Some people like to say that our current devices are fast enough, but those people either weren’t at MWC or weren’t paying attention. New, demanding workloads were on display everywhere. High-end graphics. Support for an ever-growing range of wearables. Virtual reality. Augmented reality. The ability to act as a hub for all sorts of home automation devices. These and other new capabilities place ever-increasing demands on devices—and they’re all just getting started.

As I walked all of the MWC buildings—and I did at least walk by every single exhibit—I was struck again and again by how many cool technologies are on the cusp of being ready for prime time. They’ll bring nifty features to our everyday lives, and they’ll place heavy demands on our devices to support them and enable them to run well.

Some devices will handle these demands better than others, but we won’t be able to tell the winners from the losers just by looking at them. We’ll need reliable, relevant, real-world benchmarks to sort the winners from the posers—and that means we’ll need the XPRTs. We’ll need the XPRTs we have today, and we’ll need new XPRTs and/or new XPRT workloads for the future. We’ll need help from everyone—members of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community and vendors yet to join it—to create these new tools, so that buyers everywhere can make smart purchase decisions.

It’s an exciting time. The future for tech, for devices, and for the XPRTs is bright. Let’s get busy creating it.

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Future of performance evaluation, Internet of things, IoT, Mobile devices, Mobile World Congress, PCs, Performance benchmarking, Trade Shows |

A clarification from Brett Howse

By Eric Hale

on February 18, 2016

A couple of weeks ago, I described a conversation I had with Brett Howse of AnandTech. Brett was kind enough to send a clarification of some of his remarks, which he gave us permission to share with you.

“We are at a point in time where the technology that’s been called mobile since its inception is now at a point where it makes sense to compare it to the PC. However we struggle with the comparisons because the tools used to do the testing do not always perform the same workloads. This can be a major issue when a company uses a mobile workload, and a desktop workload, but then puts the resulting scores side by side, which can lead to misinformed conclusions. This is not only a CPU issue either, since on the graphics side we have OpenGL well established, along with DirectX, in the PC space, but our mobile workloads tend to rely on OpenGL ES, with less precision asked of the GPU, and GPUs designed around this. Getting two devices to run the same work is a major challenge, but one that has people asking what the results would be.”

I really appreciate Brett taking the time to respond. What are your thoughts in these issues? Please let us know!

Eric

Posted in AnandTech, Collaborative benchmark development, DirectX, Future of performance evaluation, Let us know your thoughts, Mobile devices, Open GL, Performance benchmarking, Performance of computing devices, Performance testing on tablets, What makes a good benchmark? |

Category: Mobile devices

Airborne

Sleep studies

Staying awake

IDF16 Shenzhen

Mobile World Congress 2016 and the need for more

A clarification from Brett Howse

Check out the other XPRTs: