Here on the Android side of life we love to benchmark stuff, you could say that we have a problem but, I think it stems from the fact that we have so much when it comes to Android. You can pick from a great many different phones and still be assured a similar experience. Just as it is for PCs – Android phones are benchmarked like mad. Every time a new phone hits its benchmarked and tested to within an inch of itself. How it performs in games, web browsing, stress tests and how many megaflops we get. All this seems a little silly but sometimes this information is the only way to pick the best out of a bad bunch. Recently, most phones come packing the same Snapdragon S4 and so there’s really very little that sets them apart. Making it difficult to pick one from another.
With phones coming with bigger, brighter and all around better displays as well as more powerful processors and faster connection speeds than we’ve ever had there’s one constant in all of this that takes a beating constantly – our batteries. Our smartphones have never been so precious before and along with this, the value of our batteries has grown – if you can’t get a full day out of your phone then you’re really not going to be happy with that phone. Often nowadays, phones are shipping with none-removable batteries, making it harder to take it on the road as you can’t daisy chain batteries one after the other. How can you find out how good a phone’s battery is then? It’s not a good idea to rely on the manufacturer’s rating as they’re never going to be correct. This is where Battery Compare comes in. It’s a new application that joins the ranks of the other benchmarking suites on Android and it takes an hour of your time – whilst running in the background – to benchmark your battery. It’ll then present you with a result, ask you to fill in some other information and it’ll upload your result to the database.
There are numerous reasons why something this is going to become popular. Often, there’s a cooling off period in which you can swap the phone for another with a carrier – making this your chance to test your battery. It can let you know if there are rogue apps chewing away at battery usage and it’ll warn you how much you can expect from your battery. It’s something that a lot of people are going to be using if there on custom ROMs or just convinced a carrier update has done something it shouldn’t have. You can find Battery Compare in the Play Store, the more people that use it, the more results there will be to help users on their next purchase.