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Category: Education

The XPRTs are a great back-to-school shopping resource

Students of all ages will be starting a new school year over the next few weeks, and many learners will be shopping for tech devices that can help them excel in their studies. The tech marketplace can be confusing, and competing claims can be hard to navigate. The XPRTs are here to help! Whether you’re shopping for a new laptop, desktop, Chromebook, tablet, or phone, the XPRTs can provide reliable, industry-trusted performance scores that can cut through all the noise.

A good place to start looking for scores is the WebXPRT 4 results viewer. The viewer displays WebXPRT 4 scores from almost 500 devices—including many hot new releases—and we’re adding new scores all the time. To learn more about the viewer’s capabilities and how you can use it to compare devices, check out this blog post.

Another resource we offer is the XPRT results browser. The browser is the most efficient way to access the XPRT results database, which currently holds more than 3,400 test results from over 140 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, and independent testers. It offers a wealth of current and historical performance data across all of the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices. You can read more about how to use the results browser here.

Also, if you’re considering a popular device, chances are good that a recent tech review includes an XPRT score for that device. Two quick ways to find these reviews: (1) go to your favorite tech review site and search for “XPRT” and (2) go to a search engine and enter the device name and XPRT name (e.g. “Lenovo ThinkPad” and “WebXPRT”). Here are a few recent tech reviews that use one of the XPRTs to evaluate a popular device:

The XPRTs can help back-to-school shoppers make better-informed and more confident tech purchases. As this school year begins, we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an XPRT-related tech review. If you have any questions about the XPRTs, XPRT scores, or the results database please feel free to ask!

Justin

The XPRTs can help with your back-to-school shopping

The new school year is upon us, and learners of all ages are looking for tech devices that have the capabilities they will need in the coming year. The tech marketplace can be confusing, and competing claims can be hard to navigate. The XPRTs are here to help! Whether you’re shopping for a new phone, tablet, Chromebook, laptop, or desktop, the XPRTs can provide reliable, industry-trusted performance scores that can cut through all the noise.

A good place to start looking for scores is the WebXPRT 4 results viewer. The viewer displays WebXPRT 4 scores from over 175 devices—including many hot new releases—and we’re adding new scores all the time. To learn more about the viewer’s capabilities and how you can use it to compare devices, check out this blog post.

Another resource we offer is the XPRT results browser. The browser is the most efficient way to access the XPRT results database, which currently holds more than 3,000 test results from over 120 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, and independent testers. It offers a wealth of current and historical performance data across all of the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices. You can read more about how to use the results browser here.

Also, if you’re considering a popular device, chances are good that a recent tech review includes an XPRT score for that device. Two quick ways to find these reviews: (1) go to your favorite tech review site and search for “XPRT” and (2) go to a search engine and enter the device name and XPRT name (e.g., “Apple MacBook Air” and “WebXPRT”). Here are a few recent tech reviews that use one of the XPRTs to evaluate a popular device:

The XPRTs can help consumers make better-informed and more confident tech purchases. As this school year begins, we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an XPRT-related tech review. If you have any questions about the XPRTs, XPRT scores, or the results database please feel free to ask!

Justin

The XPRTs can help with your holiday shopping

The biggest shopping days of the year are fast approaching, and if you’re researching phones, tablets, Chromebooks, or laptops in preparation for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, the XPRTs can help! One of the core functions of the XPRTs is to help cut through all the marketing noise by providing objective, reliable measures of a device’s performance. For example, instead of trying to guess whether a new Chromebook is fast enough to handle the demands of remote learning, you can use its CrXPRT and WebXPRT performance scores to see how it stacks up against the competition when handling everyday tasks.

A good place to start your search for scores is our XPRT results browser. The browser is the most efficient way to access the XPRT results database, which currently holds more than 2,600 test results from over 100 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, and independent testers. It offers a wealth of current and historical performance data across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices. You can read more about how to use the results browser here.

Also, if you’re considering a popular device, chances are good that someone has already published an XPRT score for that device in a recent tech review. The quickest way to find these reviews is by searching for “XPRT” within your favorite tech review site, or by entering the device name and XPRT name (e.g. “Apple iPad” and “WebXPRT”) in a search engine. Here are a few recent tech reviews that use one or more of the XPRTs to evaluate a popular device:


The XPRTs can help consumers make better-informed and more confident tech purchases this holiday season, and we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an XPRT-related tech review. If you have any questions about the XPRTs, XPRT scores, or the results database please feel free to ask!

Justin

The 2019 XPRT Spotlight Back-to-School Roundup

With the new school year approaching, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve just published our fourth annual XPRT Spotlight Back-to-School Roundup! The Roundup allows shoppers to view side-by-side comparisons of XPRT test scores and hardware specs from some of this year’s most popular Chromebooks, laptops, tablets, and convertibles. After testing the devices in our lab using XPRT benchmarks, we’ve provided performance scores as well as photo galleries, PT-verified device specs, and prices. Parents, teachers, students, and administrators who are considering buying devices to use in their education environments have many options. The Roundup helps make their decisions easier by gathering product and performance facts in one convenient place.

The Back-to-School Roundup is just one of the features we offer through the XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight. Every week, the Spotlight highlights a new device, making it easier for consumers to select a new laptop, phone, tablet, or PC. Recent devices in the Spotlight include the Dell G7 15 Gaming laptop, the HP Stream 14, the ASUS Chromebook Flip, the OnePlus 7 Pro phone, and the 2019 Apple iPad Mini. The Spotlight device comparison page lets you view side-by-side comparisons of all of the devices we’ve tested.

If you’re interested in having your devices featured in the XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight or in this year’s Black Friday and Holiday Showcases, which we publish in late November, visit the website for more details.

If you have any ideas for the Spotlight page or suggestions for devices you’d like to see, let us know!

Justin

Engaging AI

In December, we wrote about our recent collaboration with students from North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science. We challenged the students to create a software console that includes an intuitive user interface, computes a performance metric, and uploads results to our database. The specific objective was to make it easy for testers to configure and run an implementation of the TensorFlow framework. In general, we hoped that the end product would model some of the same basic functions we plan to implement with AIXPRT, our machine-learning performance evaluation tool, currently under development.

The students did an outstanding job, and we hope to incorporate some of their work into AIXPRT in the future. We’ve been calling the overall project “Engaging AI” because it produced a functional tool that can help users interact with TensorFlow, and it was the first time that the students had an opportunity to work with AI tools. You can read more details on the Engaging AI page. We also have a new video that describes the project, including the new skillsets our students acquired to achieve success.

engaging-ai-vid

Finally, interested BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members can access to the project’s source code and additional documentation on our XPRT Experiments page. We hope you’ll check it out!

Justin

AI is the heartbeat of CES 2019

This year’s CES features a familiar cast of characters: gigantic, super-thin 8K screens; plenty of signage promising the arrival of 5G; robots of all shapes, sizes, and levels of competency; and acres of personal grooming products that you can pair with your phone. In all seriousness, however, one main question keeps coming to mind as I walk the floor: Are we approaching the tipping point where AI truly starts to affect most people in meaningful ways on a daily basis? I think we’re still a couple of years away from ubiquitous AI, but it’s the heartbeat of this year’s show, and it’s going play a part in almost everything we do in the very near future. AI applications at this year’s show include manufacturing, transportation, energy, medicine, education, photography, communications, farming, grocery shopping, fitness, sports, defense, and entertainment, just to name a few. The AI revolution is just starting, but once it gets going, AI will continually reshape society for decades to come. This year’s show reinforces our decision to explore the roles that the XPRTs, beginning with AIXPRT, can play in the AI revolution.

Now for the fun stuff. Here’s a peek at a couple of my favorite displays so far. As is often the case, the most awe-inducing displays at CES are those that overwhelm attendees with light and sound. LG’s enormous curved OLED wall, dubbed the Massive Curve of Nature, was truly something to behold.

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Another big draw has been Bell’s Nexus prototype, a hybrid-electric VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) air taxi. Some journalists can’t resist calling it a flying car, but I refuse to do so, because it has nothing in common with cars apart from the fact that people sit in it and use it to travel from place to place. As Elon Musk once said of an earlier, but similar, concept, “it’s just a helicopter in helicopter’s clothing.” Semantics aside, it’s intriguing to imagine urban environments full of nimble aircraft that are quieter, easier to fly, and more energy efficient than traditional helicopters, especially if they’re paired with autonomous driving technologies.

Version 2

Finally, quite a few companies are displaying props that put some of the “reality” back into “virtual reality.” Driving and flight simulators with full range of motion that are small enough to fit in someone’s basement or game room, full-body VR suits that control your temperature and deliver electrical stimulus based on game play (yikes!), and portable roller-coaster-like VR rides were just a few of the attractions.

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It’s been a fascinating show so far!

Justin

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