News reading apps are the quiet ninjas of the mobile world. On the face of it, they perform a simple, repetitive task: displaying the daily news. Whether it's the Huffington Post, the BBC, The Guardian or the Mail Online, they all go about this task in very similar ways.

Behind the scenes, however, the popularity of the leading news outlets is so great, and there’s so much pressure to engage and retain habitual readers (who are fussy and spoilt for choice), that news reading apps have become the focus of huge amounts of technical skill and resources, both in terms of software development and QA. The apps may be simple, but perfecting them isn’t.

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• GameBench Staff
• 06. May 2016

• ios, UX, testing, Mail Online, BBC News, Huffington Post, android, frame rate, fps, responsiveness, gamebench, Guardian

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The notion of frame rate, or frames per second (fps), which measures the smoothness of an animation, is traditionally associated with game development rather than app development. This is because games depend on stutter-free graphics in order to feel immersive, believable and responsive to a gamer’s touch inputs.

However, as businesses increasingly rely on visual fluidity to sell their products and transmit the quality of their brands, this distinction between the two sides of our industry is becoming obsolete.

Streaming video, displaying moving ads, scrolling through media-rich pages, swiping across screens, zooming and dragging -- at a fundamental level these are all animations that feel wrong if they’re not smooth. And frame rate is pretty much the the only objective way to measure this smoothness as a user perceives it on their screen.

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• Sharif
• 09. March 2016

• ios, UX, retail, development, android, frame rate, fps, QA, apps

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When it was first unveiled, the LG G4 made a great first impression as an all-round smartphone. It came with a nice leather option, a rich and extremely high-resolution “Quantum Display,” plus a sophisticated rear camera that has been much raved about by mobile photography gurus.

But gamers and hardware enthusiasts probably found that their eyes settled on a different characteristic of the G4: its relatively uncommon Snapdragon 808 processor. There were fears that this chip was somehow a last-minute compromise, perhaps made in response to rumours of overheating issues with the higher-end Snapdragon 810. Whatever the reason behind LG's choice, many prospective buyers have asked whether this supposed downgrade of the chipset might hurt gaming performance, and that's precisely the question we're going to try to answer using the real-world tests below. 

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• GameBench Staff
• 10. August 2015

• performance, ios, android, frame rate, gamebench, lg g4, battery, snapdragon 808

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