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Huawei Caught Manipulating Smartphone Test Scores

How do we judge smartphone specs? Well, not most of us have the technical knowledge of ripping apart a smartphone and checking out its insides. So, what do we do? We rely on data. We check statistics, see what does the phone claim to do, and also see if does the phone actually does what it claims to do.

But, have we ever stopped and thought on if those results are true or not? Well, turns out, Huawei has been ripping off customers.  So, how did this come about? 3D Mark is a tablet and phone performance benchmark app that lists smart devices. The company has delisted three Huawei smartphones from its “Best Smartphone” leaderboard.

The phones that have been delisted are the P20, the P20 Pro and also the Nova 3. But why have they been delisted? Well, 3D Mark ran its own tests on the devices, and they confirmed that these phones breach their rules. Need some more light? Well, phones are permitted to adjust performance based on their workload, and that leads to peaks or dips in performance.

Performance Tests

But that does not mean that phones are permitted to extreme peaks in the performance that are meant specifically for the benchmark app. When questioned, the company replied saying that the peak in the performance that was seen was caused by the AI, and was not purposefully.

However, when 3D Mark ran an unlabeled version of the benchmark, turns out that the phones were unable to recognize it, and so it displayed lower performances. If you want it much simpler words, it means that the phones were not as smart as advertised.

But don’t put a lot of the trauma on Huawei, because this is not the first company that was caught overstepping these rules. Samsung was caught redhanded when it stepped up the results of the benchmark tests in terms of the general performance of the phone.

True Testing

These clear violations of trust show how ignorant sometimes users can be. Trusting on test results can sometimes prove to be false, as already shown, they tend to showcase exaggerated or sometimes plain wrong results.

This also seconds the fact that a phone may perform well during heavy stress in labs, but the best way to discover the performance of a phone is through individual testing and nothing else.