ASUS Padfone X Mini Hybrid Smartphone / Tablet Review
Performance: Browsing and JavaScript
Next, we'll take a look at how the device compares to other smartphones by examining a few benchmarks that are currently available in the Android Marketplace. First, let’s take a look at the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. According to the SunSpider website:
The Padfone X mini didn't compete very well in the Browsermark test, even versus phones that are a couple of years old at this point.
This benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other. Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is:
Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered.
Balanced - This test is balanced between different areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math, all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular browsers.
Statistically Sound - One of the challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval). In addition, in comparison mode it tells you if you have enough data to determine if the difference is statistically significant.
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As a budget phone, the Mini isn't very fast when compared to more high end models. This isn't as noticeable in most cases--websites load fast thanks to the 4G LTE network--and complex, java-heavy websites aren't going to be all that usable on a low-res display, anyway.
