How we test: Smartphones and tablets | Tech Reddy

Mobile devices are essential to modern life. Whether you’re buying a new personal device or a fleet of business phones, you need to make sure you’re making the right choice, so all our smartphone and tablet reviews include in-depth technical testing to determine their relative quality. and performance.

Tablets and smartphones are compared with the same processes, but the two are used in different ways and for different use cases, which changes the context a bit. As well as testing the various technical aspects of their capabilities, we evaluate their design and ergonomics, the extra quality features they offer and the value they represent, as well as the quality of the camera.

Display

Some of our evaluations of a phone’s display are subjective observations of how it looks to the eye, but we test each screen using a colorimeter to measure maximum brightness and color reproduction. We primarily test against the sRGB color gamut, which is the primary color space that digital displays are calibrated to display, but we occasionally measure Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 color spaces when appropriate.

We also measure Delta E, which tells us how accurately the panel reproduces color. Everything under one is excellent and can be difficult to distinguish with the human eye; between one and two is still strong; the above offers a panel that is not accurate enough for professional work. However, unless you work in photo and video creation and do a lot of shooting or editing on your phone, this is unlikely to be an issue.

Performance

To measure the performance of phones and tablets, we run Geekbench 5, which is a good test of the processor and memory, and includes a test of single-core and multi-core speeds. We usually note the results and how they compare to similar devices, as well as how the phone actually feels. However, this is usually only a minor point, as most mid-range and flagship phones have been more powerful than most average users need for years, and only the most extreme power users will notice a way to slow down or lag.

Battery life

To measure the device’s battery life, we fully charge the battery, set the screen to a specific brightness level of 170cd/m2 (to ensure consistently comparable results across devices), and put it on airplane mode. We then play a looped video and measure how long it takes for the phone to reach a critical battery level and go into standby mode.

This gives us a benchmark that we can use to compare the relative performance of different devices, but it may not be representative of real-world usage. To this end, we evaluate how long the battery will last when used as an everyday device, performing various tasks every day.