It's called MobileBench: an industry consortium planning to offer "more effective" performance assessments on mobile devices -- most likely centered on, but not limited to, Android. Unsurprisingly after recent developments, Samsung joins as a founding member, alongside Broadcom, Huawei, Oppo, and Spreadtrum. While that's who's in, who isn't? Well, both NVIDIA (responsible for the Tegra series of mobile chips) and the increasingly ubiquitous Qualcomm, which makes the Snapdragon mobile processor range. Between them, they power the likes of Microsoft's Surface series, Amazon's new Kindle Fire range, not to mention numerous flagship devices from LG, Samsung, Sony and Motorola.
The group gathered for the first time yesterday in Shenzhen, China and outlined how it aims to offer more useful tools for mobile platform designers and "more reliable indices" for assessing user experience. MobileBench plans to establish impartial guidelines and a more sophisticated evaluation methodology for both its first benchmark tool, MobileBench and MobileBench-UX, for testing system-level applications. The benchmarking tool will assess hardware performance, including high-level processes like video and image viewing, camera use and other real-life use cases, with one of the primary aims being result consistency and less deviation between repeated tests. Another app is planned for consumer use in the future, likely similar to the benchmarking apps Engadget uses in its reviews. The bigger question is how much the consortium can achieve without wider adoption inside the industry -- it's apparently "actively seeking" more members.
Source: MobileBench consortium (PDF)