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Golden tickets go global

I’ve spent the last week at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. The show is somewhat reminiscent of CES in January, but with a much more European/global feel. There are seven large halls of booths with phones, tablets, accessories, and gadgets of every sort.

MWC picture

I have felt Fujitsu’s haptic technology on a tablet, seen phones operating under water such as Kyocera’s and others, and even talked with someone at Oral-B about their Bluetooth-enabled electric toothbrush.

As at CES , my primary goal has not been to play with cool gadgets, see the sights, and eat good food. (Though, admittedly, all of that has been fun!) Instead, I was here to spread the word about the XPRT benchmarks. I handed out more of the special golden tickets that invite folks to be heard by joining the BenchmarkXPRT community and to take advantage of the opportunity to have PT test devices for free with all the applicable XPRT benchmarks.

If you were not able to attend CES or MWC, or I missed you and did not give you a golden ticket (or one of our cool shirts), please contact us. We don’t want any members of the community to feel left out! And, we’d love any of the rest of you readers to join the community and be part of creating the benchmarks for the next wave of cool phones, tablets, and devices.

-Bill Catchings

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Working towards Windows 8

This past Wednesday, Bill hosted a Webinar to discuss HDXPRT 2012. He covered a lot of material. We’ll make a recording of it available on the site fairly soon.

During the Webinar, Bill mentioned that we’re working on a patch to let HDXPRT run on Windows 8. We have begun testing this patch. However, given the high level of interest in the community about testing HDXPRT on Windows 8, we are going to offer the patch on Friday to any community members that want to try it on an “as is” basis.

Using the patch is straightforward. Having installed HDXPRT on a Windows 8 system, you copy a few files to the HDXPRT\Bin folder, run a DOS script, and reboot. At that point, HDXPRT should run on the Windows 8 system. We will include detailed instructions with the download.

The patch should have no impact on the scores. This means you can compare results from Windows 8 systems with the results you already have from Windows 7 systems.

We hope that you will try HDXPRT on Windows 8 and let us know what you see. We’ll use your feedback as we finalize the update of HDXPRT 2012 that will fully support Windows 8.

When the update is available, we’ll post to the community forum, tweet, and put a notice on the Web page.

In other news, there’s a post on the forum that gives instructions for getting more detailed timing information from HDXPRT. Community members can read that post here: How to get more detailed timing information from HDXPRT 2012

Finally, the comment period for HDXPRT 2013 starts October 1. Be thinking about what you’d like to see in HDXPRT 2013!

Eric

Update: The prerelease Patch for Windows 8 is now available. You can download it here.

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TouchXPRT update

We have been busy the last couple of months with TouchXPRT. We have been investigating and trying out things on Windows 8 Metro. While we are excited by the possibilities for a benchmark in that space, the task is a bit daunting.

The first key question is what are people likely to do with a device using touch-based environment like Metro? The best way to answer that is to look at what people are currently doing with IOS- and Android-based devices. We have been playing with those as well as some units running the Metro beta. To create an initial list of roles or usage categories, we spent some time looking at what is available on the iTunes App Store, the Android Play store, and the Windows Store. Here, in no particular order, is the list of uses we came up with:

  • Consume and manipulate media – Touch devices are heavily used for consuming media (music, photos, and video), but now are being used for some simple manipulation tasks like adding simple visual effects to video, mixing and changing audio, and enhancing photos.
  • Browse the Web – Touch devices are becoming one of the main ways people consume Web content, both normal Web pages and specially crafted “mobile” pages. Touch devices are what I use to find the phone number for the nearest takeout Chinese.
  • Watch video for entertainment – Through movie apps like Netflix and TV network apps, touch devices (especially tablets) are becoming a major force in this area.
  • Play games – This is obviously something folks do on their touch devices. As best we can tell, no consumer device can ship without Angry Birds!
  • Interact with others – Through apps like Facebook and Foursquare, touch devices are becoming a big way that people interact with each other.
  • Get news and information – Another big area is general news and information, including things like stock quotes and weather.
  • Use utilities – This is a broad category—there are a ton of utilities for doing everything from moving files to backing up data.

That list covers a lot of ground and some of the areas, like games, would be particularly difficult to benchmark. We thought, however, that it would be best to get everything out and then figure out what to tackle first. The big challenges we face are the lack of apps available for Metro and having no good ability to script or drive applications. Our current thinking is to write some minimal sample apps that mimic common apps out there. These would not be complete apps, but would do some of the key functions. Then, we could build scenarios around these functions. That seems like the best approach to completing something in a timely fashion. Initially, we would aim for two or three of those areas and then add others over time.

As always, we need your feedback. Let us know what you think about the list of uses and the approach in general. And, let us know if you can help with any of the sample app development. Thanks!

Bill

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