CNET tests tablet Web speed, battery life

Each tablet has its own idiosyncrasies and when testing them, those oh so charming little quirks come to the service. In my experience thus far, The Xoom, iPad, and Galaxy Tab provided the least amount o frustrating, hair-pulling moments.

(Credit:
Eric Franklin/CNET)



Editor’s note: The video battery results for the Motorola Xoom were corrected from the original post. The original post contained results not line with our final testing methodology. I apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

During the deluge of iPad 2 coverage last week, you may have missed CNET’s handy tablets table. In it we gave an overview of the major non-Windows
tablets already released and those soon-to-be released.

For the few tablets we actually have in the CNET Labs, we’re able to go a bit more in depth with what each has to offer. For the last few weeks, we’ve tested the Web site speed and video apple battery life of a whole mess of different tablets. We’ve also tested their default and maximum respective luminosities and each tablet’s contrast ratio.

Here’s what we have so far, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ll be adding more tablets and additional tests over the coming days, weeks, and months.


How we test tablets

In the CNET Labs, we currently run three different tests to evaluate the performance of non-Windows tablets.

Battery life
We evaluate laptop battery life by continually running a movie file on the tablet until its battery dies.

We set each tablet to Airplane mode and adjust its respective brightnesses to 150 candelas per square meter (cd/M2) or as close to that number as possible.

For the
iPad, we run the iPad version of “Toy Story 3.” For Android tablets, a 720p version of “Toy Story 3″ is run. The reason we chose 720p for Android was that not every tablet can run 1080p video just yet, and we wanted to make sure we tested Android tablets under the same methodology.

On iPad, we ran the movie through its
iPod app; for Android we used the movie player, mVideoPlayer, as it provides a much needed repeat video function that not all native Android movie players include.

Site-loading speed
We used GiantBomb.com as our Web site of choice, as it doesn’t use Flash or have many dynamic elements. Each tablet was connected to the same closed network with no other devices on it, with the router about 5 feet away. The test began the moment we pressed Enter, with the end of the test signified by the disappearance of the browser’s blue progress bar.

We used the latest version of iOS for the iPad, and the Xoom is, of course, using Honeycomb, with all other Android tablets using Android OS 2.2.

Contrast ratio and brightness
We also tested the maximum brightness, default brightness, and contrast ratio for each tablet. We conducted these tests using the Minolta CA-210 display color analyzer. We used a completely white screen to test the brightness and a completely black screen to test the black level. We then divided the maximum brightness by the maximum black level to get the contrast ratio.

Read more about laptop battery life.