Huawei was caught cheating on phone benchmarks

You'd think smartphone manufacturers would have learned their lesson after being caught cheating multiple times, but that's apparently not the case. UL Benchmarks (aka the Futuremark team) has delisted Huawei's P20 Pro, P20, Nova 3 and Honor Play from 3DMark's charts after internal testing and an AnandTech exposé showed the devices ramping up performance whenever they detected the public versions of benchmarking apps. These were not subtle differences, either, with results up to 47 percent higher than they were with private test variants Huawei couldn't catch. When confronted, Huawei's Wang Chenglu told AnandTech that it wanted toe embrace standardized benchmarks that were closer to real-world experience, and that it was fudging existing benchmark results because "others do the same testing." It was a "common practice" in China, Wang said, suggesting that Huawei would lose sales if it didn't cheat. The company also told UL that it was planning to offer a speed-boosting mode through a future update (it's not clear if this is GPU Turbo from the Honor Play and 10) so that any app could benefit from the same performance boost. Not the company is eliciting much sympathy. It's using the "other kids are doing it too" excuse you used in grade school -- just because it's common doesn't make it acceptable. And when Huawei is the second-largest smartphone maker on the planet, shouldn't it be setting an example instead of following the herd? If nothing else, you'd think that Huawei would realize that the long-term consequences of being discovered would outweigh the benefits. The cheating not only took Huawei's phones out of contention, it eroded trust at a time when the company is already struggling to maintain its reputation. Source: UL Benchmarks, AnandTech via Engadget RSS Feed https://ift.tt/2wSXIdn If New feed item from http://www.engadget.com/rss-full.xml, then send me Unsubscribe from these notifications or sign in to manage your Email Applets.