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Staying Awake

on February 19, 2015

Here in the Eastern US, we’re in a deep freeze. Wherever you are, I hope you’re comfortable and safe.

Tomorrow, we’ll be releasing a patch to MobileXPRT. This patch fixes a problem first reported in a Tom’s Hardware review of the LG G3. The reviewer was not able to get MobileXPRT to run to completion on that device. We looked at the problem and found that the LG G3 was going to sleep during the performance test, and that when the device woke up, MobileXPRT caught an exception and crashed. This problem appeared to be specific to the LG G3, but could occur on other devices as well.

When we changed MobileXPRT to keep the screen active during the run of the app, the benchmark ran on LG G3 without any issues. We’ve tested this fix on our entire test bed and found that it works well. As always, the results remain comparable with previous versions.

We’ve made the same change in BatteryXPRT and are testing it now. Testing BatteryXPRT takes more time than testing MobileXPRT, but we hope to release the patch soon.

In other news, Bill is going to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, March 2-4, and he would love to meet you. If you are also planning to go, let us know.

Eric

Posted in Android, Battery life, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Mobile World Congress, MobileXPRT |

Getting the most from the XPRTs

By Eric Hale

on October 30, 2014

BatteryXPRT can measure battery life three ways: in Airplane mode, Wireless connection mode, and Cellular connection mode.

A couple of weeks ago, Tom’s Hardware ran a review of the NVIDIA Shield Tablet that shows the value of being able to compare different ways of using your device. The review gave results for two of the three modes, Airplane mode and Wireless mode, for the devices under test. While all devices had lower battery life in Wireless mode, the NVIDIA Shield Tablet showed a much larger difference between the two modes than other devices.

The review offers some technical reasons why this might be so. However, the review also includes a sentence that goes to the heart of our mission to provide easy-to-use tools that reflect real-world usage and can be used in a variety of ways. As the reviewer at Tom’s Hardware noted: “I’ve also noticed what I would consider excessive power drain during standby with Wi-Fi left on, which subjectively corroborates these results.” That is what we like to hear!

We are always looking for ways to make our tools more versatile and useful. If you have ideas, please let us know!

Eric

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Posted in Android, Battery life, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT |

Keep them coming!

By Eric Hale

on January 31, 2013

Questions and comments have continued to come in since the Webinar last week. Here are a few of them:

How long are results valid? For a reviewer like us, we need to know that we can reuse results for a reasonable length of time. There is a tension between keeping results stable and keeping the benchmark current enough for the results to be relevant. Historically, HDXPRT allowed at least a year between releases. Based on the feedback we’ve received, a year seems like a reasonable length of time.
Is HDXPRT command line operable? (asked by a community member with a scripted suite of tests) HDXPRT 2012 is not, but we will consider adding a command line interface for HDXPRT 2013. While most casual users don’t need a command line interface, it could be very valuable to those of us using HDXPRT in labs.
I would be hesitant to overemphasize the running time of HDXPRT. The more applications it runs, the more it can differentiate things and the more interesting it is to those of us who run it at a professional level. If I could say “This gives a complete overview of the performance of this system,” that would actually save time. This comment was a surprise, given the amount of feedback we received saying that HDXPRT was too large. However, this gets to the heart of why we all need to be careful as we consider which applications to include in HDXPRT 2013.

If you had to miss the Webinar, it’s available at the BenchmarkXPRT 2013 Webinars page.

We’re planning to release the HDXPRT 2013 RFC next week. We’re looking forward to your comments.

Eric

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Posted in Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, HDXPRT, HDXPRT workloads |

Search Results for: results viewer

Staying Awake

Getting the most from the XPRTs

Keep them coming!

Check out the other XPRTs: