And once set, few people are going to change their brightness depending on what they’re doing (reading a site vs watching a movie or gaming). This is one reason ambient light sensors are popular in laptops because people just won’t bother to readjust the backlight all the time.

The thing is it’s really really hard to get an objective benchmark of something like battery life when there are subjective components like eyesight and environment involved. A user who works outside in the sun will use a brighter display than one who works in a darkened room. In the end, all reviews are subjective, but nobody wants to admit that because it means trading on their credibility as reviewers. Ironically this is where print media should be focusing its attention vs the online competition. They’ll never compete on news, what they need to do is compete on quality. I will care more about a review by someone I know, or someone who’s opinion I’ve consistently agreed with in the past. Readers don’t want objectivity, they want useful information, and a reviewer’s bias and expertise are both part of that.

Without that, everything becomes a minmax game with the benchmarks. Which we’ve seen time and again with everything from CPUs to video cards to battery life now. In the end people will just throw up their hands and stop believing anything said about battery life unless it’s someone they know personally.

This is just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to… err “industry” of benchmarking!!

Majority of so-called “industry standard” benchmarks are completely disconnected from any reasonable end-user scenarios!

And the saddest part in this story is the fact that people who’re living out of benchmarking – IT journalists are not trying to do absolutely anything about it! Only exception is Johan De Gelas who practically invented new virtualization benchmark that reflects real-world much better than VMmark!

http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3567

I urge AMD tech labs to work on different new benchmarks, and to make them available for media guys and end users. Approach should be similar to Windows Movie maker, and WinRAR benchmarks – AMD provides benchmark, and users are free to use their own content for those benchmarks so that objectivity and Independence of media isn’t questioned!

I think the fundamental issue with MM07 is the fact that the benchmark makers obviously did very little research about how people actually use products. I don’t mean to be negative, but I think its fairly obvious that MM07 is the preferred method because it returns favorable statistics for manufactures of mobile electronics.

Thanks for sticking with this issue. Hopefully consumers will stand up and say, enough is enough. We all should demand proper statistics to assist us with our buying decisions.