GSMArena.com partners with SmartViser for automating its battery life test for phone reviews

2021-10-14

We’re happy to lift the curtain off an exciting development over here in the GSMArena testing labs.

After months of prodding and fine-tuning, we’re almost ready to deploy an automated system for testing the battery life of the phones we review.

This is possible thanks to our partnership with SmartViser, a company which specializes in creating custom solutions for phone testing automation based on their app called viSer. Yes, it’s an app but it’s not something you’d find available for download on the Play Store.

The ViSer App can control and automate almost every aspect of a smartphone

Up so far, we’ve always been running our battery life tests in what can be best described as a semi-automatic manner and even that’s an overstatement. Our tests are usually initiated, timed and subsequently concluded exclusively with human interaction. This meant testing was conducted only during office hours and this took a toll on the time needed to complete each phone review.

We also had insufficient log data about the phone’s parameters during the testing. Sometimes when a test would yield obviously unrealistic results, we could never tell what the reason might be, so we merely resorted to blind troubleshooting and testing again and again.

Now, thanks to SmartViser, we finally have a way of conducting all our tests in an unattended manner. Thanks to our collaboration with the amazing technical team there, we now have a customized automation solution, which takes care of running both the active parts of our tests and the charging in between.

Best of all, this doesn’t affect the battery test results themselves and they remain fully comparable to our test result database because the tests themselves are still the same as before. They’ve just been completely automated, and this takes a huge burden off our shoulders. Now, after an intensive all-night autonomous testing, all that’s left to do when we come in the morning is interpret the results over a cup of coffee.

Even better, along with the test results themselves, we now have a log of numerous system parameters, so we can check each of those on a timeline and see if there is anything out of the ordinary, which might have affected the battery life results, possibly requiring further retesting.

The net result from partnering with SmartViser for us is shorter testing cycles for our phone reviews as well as more accurate data overall. The customizability of SmartViser’s solution also opens the doors for other interesting test routines, which is something we will be looking into in the months ahead of us.

To learn more about SmartViser, check out their website.