emasculate meddler: Hardware identification tool CPU-Z makes its way to Android

Monday, June 17, 2013

Hardware identification tool CPU-Z makes its way to Android

CPU-Z

Know everything you would ever want to know about your device hardware with CPU-Z

The folks at CPUID have been around for a while. Folks using Windows computers have been using their software to get information for overclocking their computers, optimizing performance, and getting hardware information to install Linux since 2009. Yesterday, they brought a beta version of their wildly popular CPU-Z tool to Android.

The app is super simple to use, you just open it and read the screen. There no challenge, or high score, or inviting of friends involved, you just get a pretty darn complete set of information about the hardware inside your Android that you can use for debugging, or optimizing, or tweaking just like you would a Windows computer.

Everything is nice and simple, with different tabs for your SoC, system build information, battery stats and live sensor data. The interface is superb, and follows Google's Android app UI guidelines -- no black bar on your HTC devices to be seen. There's also an easy method to send debugging information to the folks at CPUID if you find any problems, as well as a setting for temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit. Not a lot of fuss is needed to get just about all the data you would ever need about your phone or tablet.

There are plenty of apps out there that will give you this same information, but people are excited about CPU-Z because of who is behind it, and what else they may have to offer. The folks at CPUID have a few legendary performance and monitoring programs for Windows, and seeing an app like TMonitor or PerfMonitor2 come to Android would get every Android nerd in a tizzy, and your favorite ROM developer would have an amazing set of tools at his or her disposal.

Of course, there's no promise that any of the other products will make their way to Android, but it's nice to dream. If you want to give CPU-Z a try -- and you should, it's free -- grab it from the Google Play link above. There are a few screenshots after the break showing you just what you'll see.