Category: TouchXPRT

Happy New Year everyone!

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.

Comment on this post in the forums

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

Winding down the year

By Eric Hale

on December 19, 2013

We have a few things we need to touch on before the year ends.

In TouchXPRT 2014, we described some of the changes to TouchXPRT. We had hoped to have the Consumer Preview out in December, but we need to do a little more work on it. However, the TouchXPRT 2014 CP is coming after first of the year, and it’s worth the wait!

For the first time ever, we found a situation that caused WebXPRT to fail. We got a report of an iPhone 5s failing. We found that the user was using the private browsing mode. The WebXPRT Offline Notes test uses HTML5 local storage to sync and store notes locally. Safari and iOS Safari don’t support setting the HTML 5 localStorage property when using private browsing mode. Not using private browsing fixes the problem.

Remember that we are in the comment period for the new battery test. Community members should definitely check out the battery test RFC.

As we mentioned before, Bill and Mark are going to CES. If you’d like to chat, send an e-mail to benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

This is the last blog of 2013. The next post will be on January 2.

It’s been a great year. Thank you all.

Happy holidays!

Eric

Comment on this post in the forums

Posted in Battery life, Collaborative benchmark development, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT |

TouchXPRT 2014

By Eric Hale

on November 21, 2013

The code for TouchXPRT 2014 is pretty far along, and we plan to move into concentrated testing in the next week or so.

A lot of work has gone into the next version of TouchXPRT and it shows. We’re making changes to the content, including larger, higher resolution photos. The revised tests are not only more demanding than the current versions, but they also introduce new types of work. For example, the export to MP3 test now mixes several music tracks before exporting the result and the photo tests include merging the photos.

The tests are also more visual than before. You’ll see the photo merge, the music mixing, and so on. We’ve really tried to make the tests tell a story, and we think you’ll recognize the way you use your device when you see them.

We’re also fixing some issues on the UI side. TouchXPRT will include a proper results browser, and have an in-UI way to submit your results. Also, the Run all button, which is on the app bar, will be visible on the main screen.

I’ll have more to say over the coming weeks. We hope to have the community preview ready to go in December. You will definitely want to look at this one!

Eric

Comment on this post in the forums

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, TouchXPRT |

Diversity

By Eric Hale

on November 7, 2013

Fall is beautiful in North Carolina. The temperature is dropping. The leaves are changing color, making the hills scarlet and orange. And, of course, the stores have been decorated for Christmas since Halloween.

As we head into the biggest shopping season of the year, it’s a great time to be getting XPRT results from the hottest devices. In the last few weeks, we’ve published results from

tablets such as the Apple iPad Air, Google Nexus 7 2, and both the Microsoft Surface 2 and Microsoft Surface Pro 2
phones such as the Apple iPhone 5c, Apple iPhone 5s, and LG G2
devices you might not have expected, such as the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX, Barnes and Noble Nook HD+, and NVIDIA Shield

The diversity of devices is nice to see. The results come from PT testing, the press, and benchmark users. Note that you don’t have to be a community member to submit results. The person who submitted the MobileXPRT Nook HD+ results was not a member. If you’ve tested something interesting, send the results on!

Eric

Comment on this post in the forums

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, MobileXPRT, Performance testing on tablets, Touch-based computing, Touch-based devices, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT results |

The Microsoft Surface 2

By Eric Hale

on October 24, 2013

As soon as the Microsoft Surface 2 became available, we got one and have been putting it through its paces. Of course, we ran WebXPRT and TouchXPRT. The results are on the TouchXPRT and WebXPRT sites, but I’ll repeat them here along with the results for its predecessor, the Microsoft Surface RT.

	TouchXPRT	WebXPRT
Surface RT	98	167
Surface 2	284	324

TouchXPRT shows the Surface 2 to be almost three times faster than the Microsoft Surface RT, while WebXPRT shows it to be almost twice as fast.

Why the difference? The most obvious explanation is that WebXPRT depends on the browser and its implementations of JavaScript and HTML5. TouchXPRT relies less on additional software and seems to take better advantage of the underlying hardware.

While we have yet to test the Intel Core i5-based Microsoft Surface Pro 2 ourselves, others have been doing so. Interestingly, Anandtech’s review of the Surface Pro 2 included WebXPRT results from both Chrome and IE. The Chrome result was over 30 percent higher than the IE result: 1,260 vs. 960. Unfortunately, Google has not made Chrome available for the ARM-based Surface 2, so we were not able to make that comparison.

As always, please let us know any results you get on any new hardware so we can get as many results as possible in our result databases. There are lots of new products coming out in the next few weeks and we’d love your help in getting results for as many of them as possible. Thanks!

Eric

Comment on this post in the forums

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Performance testing on tablets, Touch-based computing, Touch-based devices, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT results, WebXPRT, Windows 8.1 |

Sources

By Eric Hale

on September 19, 2013

If you’ve checked out the MobileXPRT and WebXPRT pages recently, you’ve probably noticed that the number of results has started to grow. The results are coming from three sources:

Internal testing at PT.
Results submitted by the public.
Results published on the Web. We link back to the source from these results. Results published on-line include results in reports PT publishes for clients and reviews by other parties.

While we are excited about the growing number of results, we do sanity check them. We compare the results with other runs for the same device when available, or with similar devices if not.

The source code for the benchmarks is available, and we encourage experimentation. However, it should go without saying that valid runs must come from the builds of the benchmarks the development community has published. We can’t compare two results generated by different builds.

That being said, if you change the code and get an interesting result, by all means do contact us. You may have discovered something that we’ll want to include in a future version

Keep the results coming and keep experimenting!

Eric

Comment on this post in the forums

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

Category: TouchXPRT

Happy New Year everyone!

Winding down the year

TouchXPRT 2014

Diversity

The Microsoft Surface 2

Sources

Check out the other XPRTs: