BDTI Announces Development of a New Consumer-Focused User Experience Rating for Mobile Devices

WALNUT CREEK, Calif., Aug. 15, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Berkeley Design Technology, Inc. (BDTI: www.BDTI.com), the technology industry's trusted source of analysis, advice, and engineering for embedded processing technology and applications today announced that it is creating a new user experience rating for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.  This consumer-focused rating will provide consumers with a tool that measures the things that directly impact user experience—battery life, application speed and network performance—for a wide variety of mobile products.  This initiative stems from the overwhelming demand for a meaningful, transparent mobile benchmark focused on actual user experience. The rating was initiated in collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, the industry leader in chipsets for mobile devices and is being endorsed by Tencent, one of China's largest Internet media platform providers.

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"Many existing mobile benchmarks do not measure attributes relevant to consumers and can be easily manipulated," explained Jeff Bier, President of BDTI.  "There is a striking lack of mobile benchmarks that measure actual user experience.  Our user-experience-focused tests will include real-world measurements of application performance, battery life, and data transfer speed and delay."

Raj Talluri, Senior Vice President of Product Management at QTI, said: "QTI believes in the need for a realistic, unbiased, and transparent benchmarking process that is designed to provide a reliable and accurate assessment of a mobile device's real-world capabilities.  With an emphasis on measuring attributes relevant to actual user experience, BDTI's rating will avoid the pitfalls of current synthetic benchmarks and will provide more meaningful information to consumers."

QTI is providing initial support for this project, as well as insights into mobile device designs.  BDTI will independently design and develop the experience rating, and will validate test results.  Initial public device results are scheduled to be released in late 2013, with general availability of the rating to follow in early 2014.

BDTI is designing this experience rating as a mobile tool for users globally.  Around the world, consumers, retailers, analysts and manufacturers have expressed the need for more meaningful benchmarks for smart phones and tablets. 

"China has become the world's most important region for mobile smart devices," said Thirty Sun, vice president of Tencent. "As one of China's largest Internet media platform providers, Tencent has unique insights into Chinese consumer preferences and smart phone use patterns.  We will be leveraging these insights to assist BDTI in providing this rating that enables holistic user experience analysis, in an effort to provide consumers with the most meaningful, objective and the authoritative rating of mobile devices."

About Berkeley Design Technology, Inc. (BDTI)
For 20 years, BDTI has been the industry's trusted source of analysis, advice, and engineering for embedded processing technology and applications. Companies rely on BDTI to prove and improve the competitiveness of their products through benchmarking and competitive analysis, technical evaluations, and embedded software engineering. Free access to technology white papers, benchmark results for a wide range of processing devices, and presentations on embedded processing technology may be found at www.BDTI.com.

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SOURCE Berkeley Design Technology, Inc. (BDTI)