Category: MobileXPRT

Willkommen, 欢迎, welcome

on September 25, 2014

I was lucky enough to see the Broadway revival of Cabaret recently. Famously, the show’s opening song reflects the multilingual reality of Europe, requiring the character of the MC to constantly switch between German, French, and English.

That is increasingly our reality as well, although I’m thinking the MC had it easy. As the popularity of the XPRTs grow, we see their use in more languages around the world. I routinely see German, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, and more. MobileXPRT is available on the ZOL app store in China, and, as I’m writing this, it’s been downloaded over 800 times!

We’re taking steps toward reflecting our own multilingual reality. For example, BatteryXPRT 2014 released with a Simplified Chinese UI. However, we have a long way to go before we can dance from one language to another.

Right now, CrXPRT only has an English UI. We would love it to have a Chinese UI before it goes community preview. More UIs would be even better! This is where having a large and diverse community is a great asset. If there’s a language you’d like to see supported, let us know. If you have the skills to help, we’d love to hear from you!

Eric

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Posted in BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Chinese, Chrome OS, CrXPRT, MobileXPRT |

Patching and future proofing

By Justin Greene

on September 18, 2014

We recently became aware of two potential issues with running MobileXPRT 2013 on versions of Android 4.4 (KitKat) and a pre-release version of Android L. The first involves a reported failure of MobileXPRT 2013 to display scores when running on a Nexus 5 running KitKat with the ART runtime enabled. ART is an experimental Android Runtime available on a number of mobile devices, and offers several features not found in Android’s current default runtime, Dalvik. We have not been able to reproduce this specific problem, and have successfully tested MobileXPRT on a Nexus 5 running Android 4.4.3 with ART enabled. If you encounter this problem, contact us at BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

The second issue is specific to the pre-release version of Android L. On that OS, we have seen a failure of the MobileXPRT Create Slideshow workload. We found that while previous versions of Android used specific addresses when loading libraries, this pre-release version of Android L loads libraries at different addresses as a security precaution. This appeared to be causing the workload failure. Recompiling with the –pie flag, so as to be position independent, seems to fix the problem.

As soon as thorough testing is complete, we’ll be releasing a patched build on MobileXPRT.com, and expect no problems running MobileXPRT on Android L.

If you have any questions about MobileXPRT or any of the other benchmarks, feel free to send us a message.

Justin

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Posted in Android, MobileXPRT, MobileXPRT 2013 source |

Time to get creative

By Justin Greene

on September 4, 2014

The CrXPRT Community Preview is right around the corner, and there’s no sign of things slowing down. We’re exploring new opportunities on a number of fronts, and we’d love to hear what you think! We’re considering possible changes to WebXPRT and MobileXPRT, and since the mobile device market is changing all the time, we’re looking for the next great benchmark opportunity. In both cases, the development community is a rich source of ideas, so we’d like to tap into it one more time.

A while back, we added a new Web form in the members’ area for submitting benchmark ideas. Some of the ideas we have so far include:

A benchmark to evaluate camera features and photo quality on phones and tablets
A benchmark for measuring the performance of cloud services
A benchmark for measuring the performance and battery life of iOS-based devices

So, what would you like to see? Any of these, or do you have ideas we haven’t mentioned? Also, we’d love to hear your feedback on ways we can improve, both with the XPRTs themselves and with community life. Either way, send a message to BenchmarkXPRTSupport@principledtechnologies.com and let us know what you think!

Justin

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development, Community Preview, CrXPRT, MobileXPRT, WebXPRT, What makes a good benchmark? |

Something new

By Eric Hale

on April 10, 2014

We have seen significant interest from China in the XPRTs over the last year, with particular interest given to MobileXPRT. Given how important Android is in the Asian market, this not a surprise.

Our newest benchmark for Android devices is BatteryXPRT. While it’s still in Community Preview, we’re experimenting a bit with internationalization. On Monday, we’re going to release a second Community Preview with a UI in Simplified Chinese. Here’s what it looks like.

BatteryXPRT uses Android’s global language setting to determine whether to display in English or Simplified Chinese. Assuming your device is currently set to English, this is the setting you change by navigating to Settings → Language & input → Language. For those who are familiar with Android development, the new resources are in the res/drawable-zh-rCN and res/values-zh-rCN directories.

If your device is currently set up to use Simplified Chinese, and if everything is working correctly, BatteryXPRT will open with a Simplified Chinese UI. For any language other than Simplified Chinese, the application will default to English.

Because this is an experiment, the localization is not complete. For example, the User Manual is still in English.

We’re close to the general release, so this will be a really quick Community Preview. We’ll release CP2 to the community on Monday, April 14. We’ll take comments for a week, through Monday, April 21. Assuming the community does not find any significant issues, we hope to release the final version shortly thereafter. Please let us know if you see any problems.

We are very aware that this is a tiny first step on the road to internationalization. We’re currently researching what it would take to localize our various assets such as the documentation and Web sites. If you have any comments or ideas, please contact us at BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

And if you’d like to try your hand at translating the user manual, let us know!

Eric

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Posted in Android, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Chinese, Collaborative benchmark development, Community Preview, MobileXPRT |

Happy New Year everyone!

By Eric Hale

on January 2, 2014

We hope you had a great holiday.

Bill and Mark are preparing to go to CES this year. We’re really excited about the chance to talk with folks because there’s so much to talk about.

It’s been a great year for the XPRTs. At the start of 2013, HDXPRT 2012 was the only XPRT benchmark available to the public. Now four XPRT benchmarks are available through our Web site. Take a look at some of the milestones from this banner year:

We released MobileXPRT 2013, TouchXPRT 2013 and WebXPRT 2013 to the public.
To reflect the expanded offerings, the HDXPRT Development Community evolved into the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community.
We radically redesigned the Web site.
The greater XPRT offerings let us test more varied devices, including the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX, Barnes & Noble Nook HD+, NVIDIA Shield, XBOX ONE, and PS4.
We released four videos.

And 2014 is going to be an even bigger year! We are very close to releasing the TouchXPRT 2014 community preview and are in the comment period for a new battery life test—and we are only two days into the year!

If you will be at CES, this is a great time make yourself heard. E-mail benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com if you’d like to chat with Bill and Mark about what you’d like to see in the coming year.

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, CES, MobileXPRT, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT |

Sounds easy, but…

By Eric Hale

on December 5, 2013

Sounds easy, but…

In Endurance, Bill said that we were going to be investigating battery life testing. He also discussed some of the issues that make battery testing difficult to do well. Finally, he explained why we were looking at MobileXPRT as the basis for the first version of the battery life test.

Over the last couple of months, we have been experimenting with a number of different approaches to battery testing. We now think that we have enough empirical data that we can make a proposal. We are working on that now. It should be available to community members in the next couple of weeks.

We hope you’ll look at the proposal and let us know what you think. Your input is an essential part of developing a really great test. If you’re not a member of the community, it’s easy to join.

In other news, we’re going to CES and would love to talk with you. If you’d like to chat, send an e-mail to benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

Eric

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Posted in Benchmarking, Collaborative benchmark development, MobileXPRT, What makes a good benchmark? |

Category: MobileXPRT

Willkommen, 欢迎, welcome

Patching and future proofing

Time to get creative

Something new

Happy New Year everyone!

Sounds easy, but…

Check out the other XPRTs: