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Has it only been 2 weeks?

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on January 16, 2014

2014 has barely started, but things are already popping!

The new battery test has a name: BatteryXPRT for Android. We are busy at work on the latest member of the BenchmarkXPRT family. The comment period for BatteryXPRT for Android ended last Friday. We greatly appreciate the comments we received on the RFC. We used them to shape the RFC into a design document, which is available on the member forum now.

In other news, we’re testing  what we hope will be the TouchXPRT 2014 community preview (CP) now. Testing is going well and we will be releasing the TouchXPRT 2014 CP to the community soon. As I said in TouchXPRT 2014, we’ve revamped the tests. They are more visual and more demanding than the old tests, and they introduce new types of work. The tests look great!

Speaking of looking great, we announced a while back that we were doing a UI redesign across the XPRT benchmarks. Unfortunately, that effort was not quite in sync with the release of the TouchXPRT 2014 CP, so the CP will use the older style UI. We will update the UI for the final version, but doing so will not affect the results.

Remember that you have to belong to the community to get the community preview. If you’re still not a member, come join us.

A new member of the family and a new version of an old friend. 2014 is off to a great start.

Eric

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Posted in Android, Battery life, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT release cycle |

Golden tickets

Bill Catchings
By Bill Catchings
on January 9, 2014

We (Bill and Mark) are on our way home from CES. There were lots of cool things to see, from electric cars to health and fitness wearables to all manner of mobile devices. And, more, a whole lot more.

We enjoyed seeing many of those products, but that was not our primary mission at the show. Our main goal was to spread the word about the XPRT benchmarks. We did that by visiting multiple mobile-device members and giving out to many of them a very special golden ticket. Yes, we’re talking a physical, Willy Wonka-style golden ticket. The two-sided tickets look really cool.

One side invites folks to be heard by joining the BenchmarkXPRT community. The other offers them the opportunity to have PT test devices for free with all the applicable XPRT benchmarks. All a vendor has to do to get this free testing is send the device to PT. We hope to get many devices in-house and to provide a great many results on our Web sites.

We wore the new BenchmarkXPRT shirts as we walked the floor.

We will soon be sending one shirt—and one golden ticket—to each member of the community. Please make sure we have your latest mailing address so we can ship those to you.

-Bill & Mark

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, CES, Future of performance evaluation, Performance benchmarking, Principled Technologies |

Happy New Year everyone!

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on January 2, 2014

We hope you had a great holiday.

Bill and Mark are preparing to go to CES this year. We’re really excited about the chance to talk with folks because there’s so much to talk about.

It’s been a great year for the XPRTs. At the start of 2013, HDXPRT 2012 was the only XPRT benchmark available to the public. Now four XPRT benchmarks are available through our Web site. Take a look at some of the milestones from this banner year:

  • We released MobileXPRT 2013, TouchXPRT 2013 and WebXPRT 2013 to the public.
  • To reflect the expanded offerings, the HDXPRT Development Community evolved into the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community.
  • We radically redesigned the Web site.
  • The greater XPRT offerings let us test more varied devices, including the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX, Barnes & Noble Nook HD+, NVIDIA Shield, XBOX ONE, and PS4.
  • We released four videos.

And 2014 is going to be an even bigger year! We are very close to releasing the TouchXPRT 2014 community preview and are in the comment period for a new battery life test—and we are only two days into the year!

If you will be at CES, this is a great time make yourself heard. E-mail benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com if you’d like to chat with Bill and Mark about what you’d like to see in the coming year.

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, CES, MobileXPRT, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT |

Winding down the year

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on December 19, 2013

We have a few things we need to touch on before the year ends.

In TouchXPRT 2014, we described some of the changes to TouchXPRT. We had hoped to have the Consumer Preview out in December, but we need to do a little more work on it. However, the TouchXPRT 2014 CP is coming after first of the year, and it’s worth the wait!

For the first time ever, we found a situation that caused WebXPRT to fail. We got a report of an iPhone 5s failing. We found that the user was using the private browsing mode. The WebXPRT Offline Notes test uses HTML5 local storage to sync and store notes locally. Safari and iOS Safari don’t support setting the HTML 5 localStorage property when using private browsing mode. Not using private browsing fixes the problem.

Remember that we are in the comment period for the new battery test. Community members should definitely check out the battery test RFC.

As we mentioned before, Bill and Mark are going to CES. If you’d like to chat, send an e-mail to benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

This is the last blog of 2013. The next post will be on January 2.

It’s been a great year. Thank you all.

Happy holidays!

Eric

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Posted in Battery life, Collaborative benchmark development, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT |

The battery life test RFC is here

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on December 12, 2013

As we’ve mentioned in recent blog posts, we’ve been investigating a battery life test.  We’ve now done enough research that we feel comfortable making a proposal for the test.  We released the RFC, or request for comments, for upcoming battery life test yesterday. Our major objective with the RFC is to get your feedback.

Given the amount of time and effort it took to develop the methodology, we had to lay a lot of code. While nothing is written in stone, things are pretty far along.

For the next four weeks, until January 8, we want to hear what you what you think about the approach, the results calculations, and anything else you think is worth discussing. Notably, we are still debating if this should be part of MobileXPRT or be its own benchmark.

Community members can download the RFC from here. If you’re not yet a member of the community, now’s a great time to join. Not only can you comment on the RFC, you’ll be able to see the community preview when it becomes available.

Since the benchmark does not have a name yet, we haven’t dedicated a forum to it yet. Please post your comments in the BenchmarkXPRT forum, or mail them to benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

Let us know what you think! We probably won’t be able to get everything done, but now is the time to dream.

Eric

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Posted in Battery life, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development |

Sounds easy, but…

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on December 5, 2013

Sounds easy, but…

In Endurance, Bill said that we were going to be investigating battery life testing. He also discussed some of the issues that make battery testing difficult to do well. Finally, he explained why we were looking at MobileXPRT as the basis for the first version of the battery life test.

Over the last couple of months, we have been experimenting with a number of different approaches to battery testing. We now think that we have enough empirical data that we can make a proposal. We are working on that now. It should be available to community members in the next couple of weeks.

We hope you’ll look at the proposal and let us know what you think. Your input is an essential part of developing a really great test. If you’re not a member of the community, it’s easy to join.

In other news, we’re going to CES and would love to talk with you. If you’d like to chat, send an e-mail to benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

Eric

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Posted in Benchmarking, Collaborative benchmark development, MobileXPRT, What makes a good benchmark? |

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