AnTuTu is the world’s most popular Android device benchmarking application with over 100 million users. The benchmarking tool was even used in Google I/O this summer and is arguably the current industry standard that many websites use as a comparison. The benchmark is designed to measure and compare many aspects of a device including the performances of the user interface, processor, graphics, memory and more. These scores are uploaded to the AnTuTu’s database and are then used to compile quarterly reports, showing the fastest reported benchmark scores out there. And we’ve received notification that the AnTuTu application has received a major update to version 5.5, which has a user interface refresh and some improvements under the skin, improving 64-bit processor testing. The AnTuTu team have also fixed a 3D test that would cause the test not to complete on some devices.
The new interface has something of an odd tilt towards both Google’s Material Design and Samsung TouchWiz. It isn’t unattractive and doesn’t bother me as I generally don’t run a benchmarking application all that often on my device, although this said I did have to run it several times to try to complete the 3D video test on my Nexus 10 running Android 5.0.1 (and unfortunately, whilst the 3D testing would complete, most of the time it crashed). So whilst there have been improvements to the application, things aren’t yet perfect: I’m sure the AnTuTu team will be working on more bugfixes. Still, for the record my Samsung Nexus 10 scored just under 30,000 and my 2013 Nexus 7 LTE, running Android 4.4.4, scores just under 27,000.
The improvements to benchmarking 64-bit processors is especially welcome now that we have several devices out there that can run 64-bit code, such as the HTC Nexus 9 tablet and a number of mid-range HTC and Samsung devices. Things will no doubt heat up when the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor arrives in devices, rather than pre-release hardware, in early 2014. Meanwhile, over to our readers: do you care about benchmark results? Do you like to see benchmark reports in hardware reviews or are you more interested in subjective assessment as to how smooth the device feels to use? Let us know in the comments below… and feast your eyes on my Nexus 10’s results. Not bad for a two year old device?
