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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

New MobileXPRT 3 installations may crash on Android 11

We recently received a tech support inquiry about problems with new MobileXPRT 3 installations on some Android 11 phones. The tester installed MobileXPRT 3 on a selection of phones running Android 11, and the app crashed immediately upon opening. We were able to reproduce the issue on multiple phones in our lab, and currently know that the issue may happen on the Google Pixel 3, Google Pixel 4a 5G, Google Pixel 4XL, Google Pixel 5, and the OnePlus 8T (running Android 11 with an Oxygen OS skin).

MobileXPRT 3 continues to run without issues on Android 9 and 10 phones. When we updated an Android 10 phone with an existing MobileXPRT 3 installation to Android 11, we found that the benchmark ran successfully. This suggests a lack of fundamental incompatibilities between MobileXPRT 3 and current versions of Android 11. Because some of our lab techs experienced crashes immediately after the app asked for permissions, we think it’s possible that new permissions-setting requirements in Android 11 are causing the problem.

We’re currently working to isolate the problem and identify a course of action. We’ll share more information here in the blog as soon as possible. If you’ve encountered this problem in your testing, we apologize for the inconvenience, and we’re thankful for your patience as we work towards a solution.

If you have any information you’d like to share about running MobileXPRT 3 on Android 11, please let us know!

Justin

TouchXPRT: a great tool for evaluating Windows performance

From time to time, we remember that some XPRT users have experience with only one or two of the benchmark tools in our portfolio. They might have bookmarked a link to WebXPRT they found in a tech review or copied the HDXPRT installer package from a flash drive in their lab, but are unaware of other members of the XPRT family that could be useful to them. To spread the word on the range of capabilities the XPRTs offer, we occasionally highlight one of the XPRT tools in the blog . Last week, we discussed CrXPRT, a benchmark for evaluating the performance and battery life of Chrome OS devices. Today, we focus on TouchXPRT, our app for evaluating the performance of Windows 10 devices.

While our first benchmark, HDXPRT, is a great tool for assessing how well Windows machines handle media creation tasks using real commercial applications, it’s simply too large to run on most Windows tablets, 2-in-1s, and laptops with limited memory. To test those devices, we developed the latest version of TouchXPRT as a Universal Windows Platform app. As a Windows app, installing TouchXPRT is easy and quick (about 15 minutes). It runs five tests that simulate common photo, video, and music editing tasks; measures how quickly the device completes each of those tasks; and provides an overall score. It takes about 15 minutes to run on most devices. Labs can also automate testing using the command line or a script.

Want to run TouchXPRT?

Download TouchXPRT from the Microsoft Store or from TouchXPRT.com. The TouchXPRT 2016 release notes provide step-by-step instructions. To compare device scores, go to the TouchXPRT 2016 results page, where you’ll find scores from many Windows 10 devices.

Want to dig into the details?

Check out the Exploring TouchXPRT 2016 white paper. In it, we discuss the TouchXPRT development process, its component tests and workloads, and how it calculates individual workload and overall scores. We also provide instructions for automated testing.

BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members also have access to the TouchXPRT source code, so consider joining the community today. There’s no obligation and membership is free for members of any company or organization with an interest in benchmarks.

If you’ve been looking for a Windows performance evaluation tool that’s easy to use and has the flexibility of a UWP app, give TouchXPRT a try and let us know what you think!

Justin

The XPRT Spotlight Black Friday Showcase helps you shop with confidence

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are almost here, and you may be feeling overwhelmed by the sea of tech gifts to choose from. The XPRTs are here to help. We’ve gathered the product specs and performance facts for some of the hottest tech devices in one convenient place—the XPRT Spotlight Black Friday Showcase. The Showcase is a free shopping tool that provides side-by-side comparisons of some of the season’s most popular smartphones, laptops, Chromebooks, tablets, and PCs. It helps you make informed buying decisions so you can shop with confidence this holiday season.

Want to know how the Google Pixel 3 stacks up against the Apple iPhone XS or Samsung Galaxy Note9 in web browsing performance or screen size? Simply select any two devices in the Showcase and click Compare. You can also search by device type if you’re interested in a specific form factor such as consoles or tablets.

The Showcase doesn’t go away after Black Friday. We’ll rename it the XPRT Holiday Buying Showcase and continue to add devices throughout the shopping season. So be sure to check back in and see how your tech gifts measure up.

If this is the first you’ve heard about the XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight, here’s a little background. Our hands-on testing process equips consumers with accurate information about how devices function in the real world. We test devices using our industry-standard BenchmarkXPRT tools: WebXPRT, MobileXPRT, TouchXPRT, CrXPRT, BatteryXPRT, and HDXPRT. In addition to benchmark results, we include photographs, specs, and prices for all products. New devices come online weekly, and you can browse the full list of almost 150 that we’ve featured to date on the Spotlight page.

If you represent a device vendor and want us to feature your product in the XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight, please visit the website for more details.

Do you have suggestions for the Spotlight page or device recommendations? Let us know!

Justin

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