UC Santa Cruz

With smartphones and tablets becoming too ubiquitous too quickly and a plethora of devices being available in the market, the dilemma of Which device is best for me? is quite natural, especially for a layman. Benchmarking each device's capability accurately would allow a user to decide which device is more suitable for him. However, existing benchmarking applications for Android devices provide rankings based purely on performance metrics without considering what a user's requirements are and hence fall short in providing meaningful recommendations.

We propose a new benchmarking application called BASCin (Benchmark for Android from Santa Cruz) which provides rankings based not only on performance metrics, but also based on one's usage requirements for different types of mobile applications. Specifically BASCin provides four different types of ranking lists namely performance based, power-usage efficiency based, battery-usage based and performance & battery-usage based and thereby caters the needs of different categories of users.

From our experiments we find that, different devices top the ranking list for different use-cases unlike a single list based on performance alone. Thus, by taking the usage requirements also into account, BASCin provides more meaningful and accurate recommendations. Additionally, BASCin can also identify the battery usage of each installed application and hence a user may decide to let go unwanted applications that drain his battery.