Basemark, the mobile benchmarking company behind tools such as Basemark X, and TÜV Rheinland, a safety certification provider, announced a partnership to provide certifications for electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, notebooks and PCs.
"We are thoroughly excited about this partnership, because it opens a whole new category of product-quality testing" said Tero Sarkkinen, Founder and CEO of Basemark Ltd. "Consumers, corporations, and government purchasers can now also choose products based on how fast a device performs various tasks. We firmly believe that our partnership results in better customer satisfaction. However, this is just the beginning of what we can do together with TÜV Rheinland, and I look forward to building a wide-ranging partnership that results in a wealth of new services for our combined roster of customers."
The partnership will provide the two companies' OEM customers with benchmarks for product performance at every stage of development, whether it's in selecting components such as CPUs, GPUs and other chipsets, or in end-product assessment.
TÜV Rheinland will be responsible for evaluating the quality, ergonomics and safety of the devices, while Basemark will use its cross-platform software tools to test and fine-tune the performance and stability of the devices.
"The thriving market for consumer electronics is constantly evolving, and user expectations are growing" said Uwe Halstenbach, Managing Director of TUV Rheinland Taiwan Ltd. "Performance, user experience, and value-for-money are becoming the decisive factors. We are thrilled to announce this new cooperation with Basemark, a benchmark developer well-known worldwide. It gives us the unique ability to offer one-stop testing service, combining all that matters to our customers: performance, safety, reliability, and ergonomics."
If more devices ended up being tested according to a higher standard, it could lead to OEMs wanting to improve their products to either beat the competition or simply offer their customers better products.
For instance, if the makers of low-end smartphones benchmark their devices and put them through some standard performance testing, that could lead to them selling devices that are stable and have good enough performance to run an operating system like Android. Otherwise, the performance could be either hit or miss, or simply disappointing, as it is often the case with low-end devices.
A standardized test could tell the OEMs exactly the kind of components and fine-tuning of either the hardware or software that they need in order to provide a good enough experience for their devices at all price levels.
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