Don’t be fooled by the nostalgic graphics and simple gameplay. Nintendo’s new mobile title, Super Mario Run, is a real battery guzzler due to its blistering 60fps frame rate, high CPU usage and always-on network connectivity. This is true of both the iOS and Android versions of the game, but the impact on user experience (and hence potentially on user reviews and revenues) is more surprising on certain top-end Android phones. Let's take a look at some numbers...
So much time has passed since the last big benchmark cheating scandal in 2013 that you’d be forgiven for thinking that the issue had gone away.
We here at GameBench had certainly hoped so -- after all, we originally built GameBench in order to help the mobile industry progress beyond this sort of behaviour, by allowing bloggers and enthusiasts to test real games and apps in order to provide a meaningful, uncheatable measurement of performance.
Is mobile VR really going to take off? Will businesses soon be expected to deliver information, entertainment and services through a pair of wireless goggles?
Consumers have the luxury of detached speculation. But for those inside the industry, whose efforts can actively pioneer the future of mobile or hold it back, VR is a more pressing concern.
At open( London ) on February 2nd, we’re hosting a series of presentations and discussions that will help hardware and software creators to address some of the most critical areas of uncertainty -- starting with how to optimise and test a mobile VR application to ensure it doesn’t leave users feeling disappointed (or worse, queasy).
It’s a perk of my line of work that I usually get given a new phone to try out every couple of months. But despite this (much appreciated) luxury, I still like to go into phone stores once in a while to get a feel for what shoppers are asking for and what they’re being sold.
That’s how I ended up at a central London branch of Carphone Warehouse just in time to receive a pitch from a very suave and eloquent salesman who was trying to sell me an iPhone 7. “Have you tried it yet?!” he asked, with apparently genuine excitement.
It was halfway through this conversation that a thought struck me: He hasn’t once asked me about my usage profile. Do I play games? Do I watch a lot of Netflix? Do I spend my evenings on social media? Am I an avid mobile photographer? Am I a pure business user, just checking emails and making calls? His sales patter made room for none of this.
J.P. Morgan has no fewer than twenty different mobile apps for its customers and staff, all ultimately designed to streamline and safeguard the movement of money.
Each app inevitably comes with risks: for example, the bank has an iOS app for its traders that authorises transactions of up to £20 million based on a single biometric login. Solid mobile testing and QA are therefore critical.
Responsibility for this testing rests on shoulders of J.P. Morgan VP Lee Crossley, who will soon be speaking at open(London) 2017 — an intensive one-day event focused on the latest QA methods and tools for mobile apps, games and VR.