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Month: February 2015

Back to Barcelona

It’s time for one of Bill’s favorite shows of the year. Mobile World Congress (MWC) starts Monday in Barcelona. Talking about technology in Barcelona, now that’s a plum assignment!

Bill’s got a lot to talk about. Since last year’s MWC, here’s some of what’s happened:

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An updated MobileXPRT 2013 build is available

Today we’re releasing a new build of MobileXPRT 2013 (b93) at MobileXPRT.com and the Google Play store. The build fixes a problem reported by a reviewer testing the LG G3. The device was going to sleep during the performance test, and causing MobileXPRT to crash after waking up. We’ve seen this problem only on the LG G3, but it may occur on other devices as well.

The new MobileXPRT build keeps the screen active during the run. Scores from this build are comparable with previous MobileXPRT scores.

Click here to download the new MobileXPRT installer (250 MB) directly from our site.

For users who have limited bandwidth or trouble accessing the Google Play store, downloading the APK files (16.9 MB total) may make installation easier.

Download the updated MobileXPRT APK (10.3 MB) directly from our site.

Download the updated MobileXPRT UX Tests APK (7.6 MB) directly from our site.

If you have any questions about the update or any other XPRT-related topic, feel free to contact us at BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

Staying Awake

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

A guest blog from Wilson Cheng at Acer Inc.

Two years ago, I got a job to evaluate cross-platform benchmarks for comparing Windows and Android.

Usually, Web-based benchmarks focus on only Java-script and HTML5 functionality. I found WebXPRT is easy to use and includes the tasks that you do every day. It reliably tests the user experience and gives a simple score for comparison. I suggested to our manager that we use it to evaluate our platform and he agreed.

Recently, Chromebooks have become very popular. Testing the battery life of Chromebooks has been difficult because you have needed to use the power_LoadTest image from the Chromium project or the test image from the Chrome OS Partners Web site to do power load testing. Without reimaging the system, you couldn’t test battery life. Because CrXPRT is designed to test battery life as well as performance on ChromeOS, this extra step is no longer needed. We can run CrXPRT without updating the test image, which is very useful in our battery life testing.

The advantage of XPRT benchmarks is that they are easy to use and give real-world results. The disadvantage is that they are not yet popular on review sites.

An updated CrXPRT 2015 build is available

Today we’re releasing a new build of CrXPRT 2015 (v1.0.2) in the Chrome Web Store. The updates included in this build correct the handling of outlier scores for individual workloads, check the duration of each battery-life test iteration, and introduce a check to ensure that the system is not plugged in during battery-life testing. The tests have not changed, and the method of calculating the overall score and battery-life score is the same, so the main scores are comparable with previous CrXPRT scores.

We published the update today in the Chrome Web Store as of 3:00 PM EST, but it may take some time for the update to appear on your system. You may have to manually approve the update notice when it appears on your system.

If you have any questions about the update or any other XPRT-related topic, feel free to contact us at BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

Polishing the chrome

Early next week, we’ll be releasing an update for CrXPRT that addresses a couple of issues. First, the individual workload scores were not always discarding outliers correctly, which could have had a small effect on those scores. The update handles outliers correctly. Because the overall score is calculated separately from the individual workload scores, this change does not affect the overall score or battery life score, and results from previous builds are still comparable.

The update also checks the duration for each battery life test iteration. This helps detect conditions that could invalidate the test, such as someone manually putting a test system to sleep.

Finally, the update checks between iterations to see if the Chromebook is plugged in during the test. If so, CrXPRT will report an error and stop the test. This can potentially save time that would otherwise be lost on an invalid run.

These are small changes, but they will help make CrXPRT a more robust benchmark.

In other news, we’ve been asking members of the community if they would care to share their experiences and thoughts on the blog.  We’re delighted that people are interested, and we’ve already received our first guest post that we’ll be publishing in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, if you’d like to write a post, or just want to share your thoughts on the XPRTs, please let us know!

Eric

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