Category: MobileXPRT

Notes from the lab

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 |

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 |

TouchXPRT’s future

By Bill Catchings

on February 2, 2017

If you’ve been following the blog, you know that we’ve been reviewing each part of the XPRT portfolio. If you missed our discussions of HDXPRT, BatteryXPRT, WebXPRT, and CrXPRT, we encourage you to check them out and send us any thoughts you may have. This week, we continue that series by discussing the state of TouchXPRT and what we see down the road for it in 2017.

We released TouchXPRT 2016, an app for evaluating the performance of Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile devices, last February. We built the app by porting TouchXPRT 2014 performance workloads to the new Universal Windows App format, which allows a single app package to run on PCs, phones, tablets, and even consoles.

TouchXPRT 2016 installation is quick and easy, and the test completes in under 15 minutes on most devices. The app runs tests based on five everyday tasks (Beautify Photos, Blend Photos, Convert Videos for Sharing, Create Music Podcast, and Create Slideshow from Photos). It measures how long your device takes to complete each task, produces results for each scenario, and gives you an overall score.

As we think about the path forward for TouchXPRT, we’re aware that many expect 2017 to be a year of significant change in the Windows world, with two updates scheduled for release. Microsoft is slated to release the Windows 10 Creators Update (Build 1704) in April, and a subsequent version of Windows codenamed Redstone 3 may arrive this fall. Many tech observers believe that the Creators Update will introduce new creativity and gaming features, along with a UI upgrade named Project NEON. Major foundational shifts in the OS’s structure are more likely to appear with Redstone 3. At this point, quite a lot is still up in the air, but we’ll be following developments closely.

As we learn more about upcoming changes, we’ll have the opportunity to reevaluate TouchXPRT workloads and determine the best way to incorporate new technologies. Virtual reality, 3D, and 4K are especially exciting, but it’s too soon to know how we might incorporate them in a future version of TouchXPRT.

Because TouchXPRT 2016 continues to run well on a wide range of Windows 10 devices, we think it’s best to keep supporting the current version until we get a better idea of what’s in store for Windows.

If you have any thoughts on the future of Windows performance testing, please let us know!

Bill

Posted in BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, BenchmarkXPRT development community, CrXPRT, Future of performance evaluation, HDXPRT, MobileXPRT, PCs, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT 2016, TouchXPRT development process, TouchXPRT release cycle, WebXPRT 2017, Windows 10 |

BatteryXPRT’s future

By Justin Greene

on December 1, 2016

A few weeks ago, we discussed the future of HDXPRT. This week, we’re focusing on the current state of BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, and how the benchmark may evolve in 2017.

BatteryXPRT continues to provide users with reliable evaluations of their Android device’s performance and battery life under real-world conditions. Originally designed to be compatible with Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) and above, the benchmark continues to work well on subsequent versions of Android, up to and including Android 6.0 (Marshmallow).

Since Android 7 (Nougat) began to roll out on select devices in the past few months, our internal testing has shown that we’ll need to adjust the BatteryXPRT source code to maintain compatibility with devices running Android 7 and above. We developed the existing source when Eclipse was the officially supported SDK environment, and now we need to bring the code in line with the current Android Studio SDK.

Practically speaking, BatteryXPRT does run on Nougat, and to the best of our knowledge, battery life results are still accurate and reliable. However, the test will not produce a performance score. As more Nougat devices are released in the coming months, it’s possible that other aspects of the benchmark may encounter issues. If this happens during your testing, we encourage you to let us know.

Because MobileXPRT 2015 and BatteryXPRT 2014 performance workloads are so closely related, the next obvious question is whether MobileXPRT 2015 runs on Nougat devices. As of now, MobileXPRT 2015 does run successfully and reliably on Android 7, and this is because the most recent build of MobileXPRT 2015 was compiled using a newer SDK.

We think the best course of action for MobileXPRT 2015 and BatteryXPRT will be to eventually combine them into a single, easy-to-use Android benchmark for performance and battery life. We’ll talk more about that plan in the coming months, and we look forward to hearing your input. Until that transition is successful, we’ll continue to support both BatteryXPRT and MobileXPRT 2015.

As always, we welcome your feedback on these developments, as well as any ideas you may have for future XPRTs.

Justin

Posted in Android, Android L, Android M, Android N, Battery life, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Collaborative benchmark development, MobileXPRT 2015 |

How do you say that?

By Eric Hale

on November 10, 2016

I recently saw this video, and heard something that I had never imagined: “Next we tested with what I assume is pronounced web-export.” I’ve had people ask if it was an acronym, but I ‘ve never heard it pronounced “export.”

How do we pronounce XPRT? The same way we pronounce “expert.” So, it’s “Benchmark expert,” “Web expert,” “Touch expert,” and so on. CrXPRT is pronounced “C‑R expert” and HDXPRT is pronounced “H‑D‑expert.”

When I was working in Australia, I got teased about my accent quite a bit, and my case-hardened American R was a particular target. So, when I say the letters out loud, is comes out something like “eks‑pee‑arrr‑tee,” (arrr like a pirate would say it) and “expert” is the closest match. This is true for most Americans. However, in many other accents, it’s more like “eks‑pee‑ah‑tee,” and “ex-paht” is much closer to “export.”

Yes, I think way too much about this stuff.

Eric

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, CrXPRT, HDXPRT, MobileXPRT, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT |

They’re coming!

By Eric Hale

on June 16, 2016

We’ve been hearing for a while about Google’s plan to bring Android apps to Chrome. They recently published a video on the Google Developers channel that gives us some idea of what running Android apps on a Chromebook would look like.

Because I’m very interested in performance, the claim “Android apps can run full speed, with no overhead and no performance penalties” got my attention. You can bet we’ll be using the XPRTs to check that out! We’re using a Google developer tool called ARC Welder to do some experiments. However, it’s not fair or valid to print performance results based on a developer tool, so we’ll have to wait until the official release to see what the performance is really like.

Obviously, the use cases for Chrome will be changing. The demos in the video are for workloads we associate with PCs. MobileXPRT-type workloads might be more appropriate, or, assuming the scripting tools are available, perhaps HDXPRT-type workloads. We’ll be watching these developments closely to see how they will affect our future cross-platform benchmark.

Eric

Posted in Android, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, Google Chrome, HDXPRT, MobileXPRT, PCs |

Category: MobileXPRT

Notes from the lab

Running Android-oriented XPRTs on Chrome OS

TouchXPRT’s future

BatteryXPRT’s future

How do you say that?

They’re coming!

Check out the other XPRTs: