I am frequently asked by people; what are your testing procedures? How do you find out that a phone has good performance or not? What are the limits to a phone being fast, considering its price?
We don’t really have some big swanky techniques to check that out, neither do we have a huge supercomputer to which we would merrily plug in the phones and within a few minutes, the computer will be printing its whole Kundli on the screen.
But what we really do is notice carefully how a phone behaves in duress and check how smoothly some particular applications run. You can follow these few steps listed here to check if your phone in snappier enough to run lag free and keep your anger from exploding (some phones do make you fell hell must be a better place). To add to this, do make sure you check the user interface first. If the opening/ closing of inbuilt apps like gallery, music/video player, maps, multiple tabs in browser, etc has some lags in the starting itself, chances are that as you load it with more apps, it’s going to lose it.
- Opening and Closing time of Apps
Application taking longer than usual to open/close, it’s one of those phones that would hang miserably when you would need it the most. Because, using phone faster than usual during an emergency kind of situation, we tend to access things much faster and want the phone to respond duly. This creates a chain to commands lined up at the back-end of a slow processing phone that makes it give up.
How to test -Just start an app to see if it opens within a second or two. Leave some 7-10 apps running in the background and see how does a particular app, say browser, works. Next, try to shift to background apps and check the speed.
If you have another well performing phone, use it to simultaneously open the same application and copmpare the difference, it shouldn’t be high.
If you have another well performing phone, use it to simultaneously open the same application and copmpare the difference, it shouldn’t be high.
- Check the benchmarks
Benchmarks can be misleading. A great deal of swiftness depends on how efficiently the software is built to utilize different cores of the CPU. Even a quad core, if not properly engaged for multitasking, might lag while a dual core with proper software would run smoothly.
Still they can give you a fair idea of the raw processing power of a phone. Moreover, there are benchmark apps that test a particular area of performance of the phone like 3D rendering, browsing performance (HTML5), raw processing numbers, stability test (AnTuTu)
How to test- Download applications available on the store. You can try typing ‘Benchmark’ to get a list. Some popular ones are Nenamark, AnTuTu, Vellamo, 3D mark, etc.
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- Gaming
There’s not really a direct relation of gaming performance with the smooth working of the phone. A phone’s interface might lag but still it might be able to run some good graphic demanding games pretty smoothly. And the reason for this is the GPU.
GPU is a separate processor for handling graphics. If it’s better, games will have no problem rollin’. But still a phone needs good overall integrity on the software and chipset part to be able to pull some graphic intensive games. So this surely test that.
GPU is a separate processor for handling graphics. If it’s better, games will have no problem rollin’. But still a phone needs good overall integrity on the software and chipset part to be able to pull some graphic intensive games. So this surely test that.
How to test- Just download some graphic intensive games. Games like Temple run, Asphalt 8, injustice, into the dead, clash of clans; there are plenty. Check if the frames are skipped or the phone altogether stops working after a while.
- Video playback
Most phones are nowadays able to play videos rated at 720p. So if your phone is able to play at least that, that means it’s well off. Going upper in the price segment, some phones can run 1080p even 4K videos.
How to test- You would need a video with a resolution of at least 720p. To check the resolution of a video just play it in your computer and in the video player, right click to find details/media info. or check it under properties>details>video. The resolution is the frame width and height of the video. Notice in the width it would be written as 480 pixels or 720 pixels.
At the end of the day, it’s the user interface, at least, that needs to be free of any lags and glitches. Smartphones don’t need bulky multiple core processors to run lag free. Otherwise a phone has enough computing power nowadays that it can compete with a computer that we used not long but a decade back.
Have your own performance testing method? Share with us in the comments below.
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