The same tricks are being used in voting machines, I hear.
I donât think the second type, automatically using 100% of speed and cpu cores when benchmark apps are detected, is really cheating. Thatâs optimization. They wouldnât call it cheating on a battery life test if the OS aggressively took steps to reduce power consumption when certain scenarios were detected.
Clearly the solution is to test battery power while running the benchmarks. If you see âBattery life 36 hours standby, 10 hours browsing the web, 7 hours watching video, 90 minutes running benchmarksâ then itâs pretty clear that there are shenanigans going on.
Itâd serve them right if the quick look at the point then said âbattery life is 90 minutes.â
I would agree if the test were one of efficiency, but itâs not. The test is of computing horsepower. However, an efficiency benchmark would be a really great addition. It would also fit with Appleâs push towards battery life as their primary benchmark for phones and laptops. I think theyâre right to focus more on battery life now that cpu/gpu performance has gotten to a level where most consumers will never experience a practical difference. So, it would be nice for the industry to focus more on efficiency, i.e. âwhich phone does more with less?â
Appleâs primary benchmark is thickness. If it was battery life they wouldnât be shaving shave a millimetre off a phone, and would give us more battery instead.
True. Appleâs priority benchmark is cachet. In terms of technical specs, theyâve been touting battery life lately.
itâs time to stop trusting benchmarking apps altogether.
Good luck with that. Theyâve existed since the beginning of (computer) time because people really want them. Like fortune tellers, astrology, and computer âanalystsâ like Pachter, it doesnât even matter if theyâre mostly wrong. Trust is entirely beside the point.
Partisans want them as confirmation bias, normal users want them as a score on the decision they made. If your device is near the top thatâs bragging rights. If itâs average, well, itâs pretty good. If itâs near the bottom that can either feed into a victimization complex or a hate-on for your device (another form of victimization complex). Or you can perversely decide to revel in it. LG Optimus owners know what Iâm talking about.
Well if they leave benchmarking apps, we get more marketing. Now thatâs scary and completely false. =(.
I agree entirely. The fact is that very very few apps use the ridiculous power of the computers many of us carry around in our pockets. My phone has a quad core 1.7GHz processor and 2GB of RAM⌠how many apps do people think really take advantage of that hardware? The answer is: very few, so it entirely makes sense to turn off some of this hardware if itâs not being used. There is nothing that the benchmarking apps are doing to game the results and the same settings could be turned on by any app to get at that power. The reason they donât leave it on the whole time is so the battery doesnât drain in an hour, so the worst possible accusation one could make is that theyâre messing with non-power-hungry apps to game battery life results (also known as optimisation).
Iâd also like to add that Charles Arthur is a fool who writes scaremongering linkbaity crap. Iâm shocked that he remains The Guardianâs tech editor and that his opinions are repeated here on BB.
PS: On a recent ep of All About Android they mentioned that if you want to get âunoptimisedâ results out of the benchmarking apps you simply have to rename the apk before installing because the S4 (and others) apparently use the apk title as a cue to turn on optimisation.
Web browsers use up a surprising amount of memory.
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