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davester wrote:
It's way ahead on camera and video quality. It only loses the battery life rating to the gigantic Droid Razr Maxx HD, obviously because you can pack a giant battery into a brick.
Brick? The RAZR MAXX is the exact same thickness as the iPhone 4S. The 4S is now considered a brick?
davester wrote: It's pretty obvious that they are only rating the hardware "features" and are paying no attention to the OS, to the ability to put the phone in your pocket, or the user friendliness of the design. You can keep your monster phones as far as I'm concerned. I do not want to try to jam a tablet into my shirt pocket.
I disagree. I think many people consider the whole package when reviewing devices. Because you disagree doesn't necessarily invalidate their findings. Hand waving and wishy washy language about user friendliness and OS design, all without actual specific points isn't enough to dissuade people unattached to any specific company loyalty.
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Lux Interior wrote:
[quote=silvarios]
one of them is good for forcing upgrades against your own possible preferences.
As long as I still have my PS-2 & parallel ports!
Well, yeah, obviously man. 
I actually meant upgrading software on older hardware or being forced to buy new hardware if you want to support newer software. Sometimes the software I want to use requires an OS update to use the newer versions. Sometimes the newer versions are really worth the upgrade, but having to upgrade the whole OS or hardware and OS is a bit of pain.
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Kramerica wrote:
Their numeric rankings are not explained, and are probably somewhat arbitrary. But even so, the difference in the scores between the "best" and the "worst" (on ATT) is only 2 points. Dumb article.
I agree with your take. Not like Consumer Reports said the iPhone 5 was the worst phone on the market. Good products often get lumped together by a matter of a few points on an overall score. The final choice becomes a matter of personal taste. No big deal, right?
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Silvarios,
So true! I think Consumer Reports even says that differences of just a few points are pretty much meaningless. A phone that has an overall rating of 85 isn't going to be noticeably worse than a phone rated at 90. Much greater differences, i.e. 90 vs 60, then you're talking what is likely a meaningful difference.
Robert
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silvarios wrote:
Reminds me of WIndows versus Mac. People managed to use Windows XP for so long because apps still targeted XP users, but on the Mac, many apps would require the most recent or two version of OS X. Different dynamics, one of them is good for forcing upgrades against your own possible preferences.
That's some amazing pro M$ spin there Nathan. The real reason for the "different dynamic" is because Microsoft couldn't get its act together to produce a halfway decent operating system, but kept aborting new OS projects until it finally managed to release the stillborn Vista which everybody then refused to buy. It's got nothing to do with one company being good at forcing upgrades against personal preferences but everything to do with M$'s incompetence (talking of which, have you ever tried to deal with M$'s 64-bit/32-bit Windows mess, or their disastrous .NET transition? Dealing with proprietary software on recent versions of Windows is a friggin' nightmare!
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Robert M wrote:
Silvarios,
So true! I think Consumer Reports even says that differences of just a few points are pretty much meaningless. A phone that has an overall rating of 85 isn't going to be noticeably worse than a phone rated at 90. Much greater differences, i.e. 90 vs 60, then you're talking what is likely a meaningful difference.
Robert
If that is true (which I certainly agree with) then CR should not rank them or show meaningless scores. They should instead aggregate them into meaningful categories. There are a lot of folks out there who will blindly buy the phone with the highest "score", unaware that the weighting that CR gives each feature is completely made up and often meaningless. This is why CR is such a crappy arbiter of quality for so many products.
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Yes, because responding to someone who just posted M$ will be a worthwhile use of my time.
You do realize I don't like Microsoft and largely avoid their products? The years of Linux and now Android FUD has soured me on the company. However, I will not ignore the fact that long upgrade cycles can in fact be good for consumers. I will not ignore there is something inherently interesting about the promise of a light weight device most of the time, which can switch to a real computer when needed (Windows 8). I will not ignore that good ideas can come from somewhere other than 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino, CA.
Will I buy into the next round of Microsoft products? No, probably not.
How about this scenario, I have a bunch of computers which can only upgrade to Lion. How do I go about buying Lion for those machines? Point me to the official Apple upgrade path. If you don't find one, could you go ahead an pay the freight to get me a half dozen new computers in order for me to have a version of Mac OS which still receives bug fixes and security updates?
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davester wrote: There are a lot of folks out there who will blindly buy the phone with the highest "score", unaware that the weighting that CR gives each feature is completely made up and often meaningless. This is why CR is such a crappy arbiter of quality for so many products.
Consumers can't read past a score in the list? If so, how is that a problem with the publication?
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davester,
I forgot to add, OS X had to iterate as fast as it did because it was a rather crappy platform in the early days. 10.0 and 10.1 just weren't that great. 10.2 was much better, but I can't say the platform was superior to XP until 10.3, and possibly even 10.4. Tiger was really nice.
Notice, I still didn't use XP by choice, or even particularly like it much when forced to by different clients. However, to be perfectly candid, my whitebox XP Pro tower was stable and reliable. No junk add-ons, only the software I added, and the hardware, while entry level, was still well specced for the task. Still didn't stop me from dual booting into Ubuntu for most tasks.
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I have never understood the people at CR. I used to have a subscription, finally had to drop it after seeing review after review that hated on Macs and seemed to fawn on PC/microsoft stuff. Never could understand it. Is it the tendency to only hire super nerdy IT rejects for its review staff? If you look at what has happened over the last 5 years with apple products and MS decline, then go back and read the CR reviews, you would conclude that they were smoking crack. It used to be a pretty good, unbiased magazine for lots of items such as large appliances and cars. Now, I am not so sure. They have always been way off base on technology.
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