A cell phone is just like other electronic devices which could have degradation in quality. How far it degrades, usually we measure it on the speed of the access or errors that show up. These events are something that indicates something wrong with your cell phone but to be sure you could use several benchmarking software which are luckily free to download. With those applications you could retrieve the performance of your cell phone by comparing the results to the standard value of the specific cell phone.

Benchmarking is like an evaluation of certain parameters, in case of the cell phone, we could benchmark the graphic performance, cell phone display quality, color quality, 3D performance and the JAVA MIDP performance.

Measuring the graphic performance

To do this you could use an application called FPC bench. This application is very useful for PDA’s and cell phones. The application is based on JAVA and the free software could be downloaded from www.dpsoftware.org. FPC benchmarks 3 parameters which are the CPU/Memory, GPU and Internal/External Memory. In case your still confused it means that this software benchmarks the cell phone processor, graphic processor, the internal and the external storage. FPC benchmark has a result database that could be useful to compare results.

Measuring the Color Quality and the 3D performance

In order to measure the color and the 3D performance we could use free software named the Matrax Bench. You could download it at http://storage.e398mod.com/java/matraxbench.zip. The application could be used by any kind of Java cell phone with 3D support.

The graphic test is mainly done towards the rendering of moving pictures, color filling and drawing speed. Like the FPC we could also compare it with a standard value.

Testing the LCD Quality

This test is to know whether dead pixels exist in the cell phone LCD. The application is called LCD-Test and it’s free software too. Download it at http://thttpd.seclub.org. The application does 3 tests which are the white screen test, black screen and rainbow screen test. If on those test some spots show up then probably dead pixels exist on your cell phone.

Know Which JAVA is on your Cell Phone

The specification of the cell phone on the box usually doesn’t show detail or specific information. Sometimes were only told that the cell phone supports J2ME MIDP without further information. At the end maybe we’re not happy because some application doesn’t work. This is because of the different versions of JRE on different vendors. For example a Chinese phone will have a different Java from a Sony Ericsson cell phone, although they have a similar MIDP version 2.0.

To know further information about the JAVA MIDP version on your cell phone, you can use the MIDP Sys Info. This application also could test the data reading speed and the internet connection speed. You could download it for free at www.brothersoft.com