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Month: February 2014

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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MWC is coming

As you probably know, the Mobile World Congress (MWC) starts Monday in Barcelona. Bill loves gadgets, loves Barcelona, and loves talking about technology, so he’s really looking forward to being there.

Bill’s got a lot to talk about. In January, we released the first community preview for TouchXPRT 2014. Then on February 7, 2014, we released the first community preview for a brand new benchmark: BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android. Not only that, HDXPRT and WebXPRT are in development. And he always loves to hear about new areas where you are interested in having benchmarks.

And that’s not all – If you read Bill and Mark’s post about being at CES, you’ll be happy to know that the Golden Tickets are back! The Golden Tickets let you join the community and get your device tested for free. If you’re a mobile device manufacturer, be sure to find Bill to get yours.

If you want to meet with Bill, send an e-mail to BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com. You can also DM us on Twitter at @BenchmarkXPRT.

We hope to see you there!

Eric

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BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android CP1

Last week we released the BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android Community Preview 1 (CP1). As I said in last week’s blog, You wanted it? You got it!, you are free to publish results from this community preview.

We hope you’ll submit results to be published in the BatteryXPRT database. You’ll find the file containing your results in the Android\data\com.batteryxprt\BatteryXPRT\results directory on the SD card of your device. The results directory will contain a time-stamped directory for each run – for example, “2014Feb11142239.” You’ll find a file named Results.xml in the appropriate time-stamped directory. To submit a result, just e-mail the Results.xml file from your run to BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

The benchmark includes a user manual in the UI. In addition to the benchmark itself, you can also find installation instructions and a design overview in the member’s area.

We’ll make the source code for the community preview available in the next few days.

Given the diversity and changing nature of Android devices, we expect that you may run into some issues. As with any of our community previews, if you encounter any issues, please let us know so we can continue to improve the benchmark as we prepare it for release.

Community previews are only available to community members. If you are not a member, this a great time to join.

After you’ve downloaded CP1, let us know what you think by posting to the forum or e-mailing us at BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

Eric

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BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android Community Preview 1 is available to community members!

As promised in You Wanted it? You got it!, we are releasing the BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android Community Preview 1. See Community Preview 1 is available! for the details. (login required)

If you are not a community member, it’s easy to join!

Eric

You wanted it? You got it!

As Bill said in Endurance, when we asked what new benchmark people most wanted to see, battery life was number one. Over the past few months, we’ve announced that we’re developing a battery benchmark, solicited input from the community, and have been hard at work developing BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android.

I’m happy to announce that we’re releasing BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android Community Preview 1 (CP1) later this week. CP1, as its name makes clear, is not the final BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android release. There’s still a lot of work to do on the user interface and the new results viewer. However, it’s a great way for everyone in the community to see the current state of our thinking and to provide us with feedback. You can run this version of the tool and see what you think!

As we’ve done with previous community previews, we’re also taking two more steps:

  • We’re not putting any publication restrictions on this preview release. Test at will, and publish your findings.
  • We’re releasing the source code to all community members. If you’re curious about not just what we’re doing but how we’re doing it, you can find out.

As the design document explains, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android can estimate battery life in less than 6 hours. You can also use it as a rundown test if you prefer. In addition, CP1 is the first of our benchmarks to use the new UI design. Here’s a peek:

BatteryXPRT CP1 home screen

As you can see from the screenshot, you can run the test in Airplane mode or connected to the network. There are other cool features we’ll be talking about once CP1 is available.

We’re really excited about this one. I can’t wait!

Eric

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