Konsortium vil gøre det lettere at teste mobile devices

Test af blevet en flaskehals i forbindelse med udvikling af de stadig mere komplekse mobile devices. Den problemstilling adresseres nu af et nyt industrikonsortium (in english).

The consortium will initially focus on addressing the need of developers to better understand every element within the mobile platform and deliver optimal system-level performance to enhance the user experience.

As telecommunication networks evolve, mobile applications are being pressed to provide users with faster next-generation interfaces, based on clear environmental guidelines and industry parameters. MobileBench will provide mobile platform designers with more useful solutions based on speedy time-to-market analysis, and consumers with more reliable indices for better assessing the user experience.

Setting impartial test guidelines and embracing more sophisticated evaluation methodology, the consortium believes its tools will be widely adopted by mobile device designers and engineers, to the benefit of OEMs and consumers alike. The consortium, which is actively seeking new members, currently has five board members: Broadcom, Huawei, OPPO, Samsung and Spreadtrum.

- With the cooperation of the mobile industry at large, the MobileBench Consortium is seeking to give top priority to providing users with added convenience and more usable features. Broad adoption of MobileBench's applications will better delineate differences in performance and enable mobile system designers to deliver uniform performance in more diverse user environments at a faster pace, says Dr. Byungse So, Senior Vice President, Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering, Samsung Electronics.

It held its inaugural meeting in Shenzhen, which was attended by local government dignitaries and mobile device companies. The MobileBench Consortium plans to soon introduce two professional engineering tracks: the MobileBench for hardware evaluation and the MobileBench-UX for testing system-level applications that address factors affecting the user experience.

In the future, the consortium also intends to introduce a test system for consumers to evaluate personal mobile devices on their own. The consortium's first benchmark tool, MobileBench, is a comprehensive program designed for engineers and system designers, and was publicly demonstrated for the first time at the event.

It is a performance assessment tool that expands mobile testing from simply assessing individual components and other conventional factors to include more sophisticated test focuses such as video/image file viewing, video filming, and other specific mobile modes and services to which users can clearly relate. MobileBench evaluates hardware components. It consists of a mobile device, including core elements such as application processors, popular memory solutions, embedded storage (eMMC) and graphics memory chips.

Besides analyzing these basic test areas, engineers can set up detailed parameters such as repetition and intervals, with each test result being monitored in real-time, allowing usage pattern and system status analyses. MobileBench-UX is designed for evaluating user centric applications such as switching among different apps, video shooting and viewing, and phone camera operations. Test results are immediate.

- The MobileBench Consortium will make significant inroads in providing objective ways to evaluate a mobile device'sperformance in the real world. Together with other industry leaders, we will standardize many of the core benchmarking tools that developers and engineers use, as we accelerate innovation in the development of mobile applications, says Rafael Sotomayor, Vice President, Mobile Platform Solutions, Broadcom.

More information: www.mobilebenchconsortium.org