Here's an idea for you guys (in regard to 'best of' lists)

[worknman]

I think as we all know by now, trying to pick a 'best phone' or 'best tablet' is rather pointless, because everybody has their own personal preferences. For example, I don't care what the phone looks like AT ALL. In fact, I'll take an orange block if it's comfortable to hold and fits in my pocket. I just really don't give a rat's ***. On the other hand, I consider anything less than 32gb of internal storage to be a mid-range device. (Well, unless it's a watch or something.) I don't care how beefy the CPU is, or even if it has a microSD card slot. Anything with 16gb of storage is a deal-breaker as far as I'm concerned.

Now, I know there are folks who would disagree with me, and that's fine. The point is that everyone has their 'must have' features and deal breakers, and these reviews and 'best of' lists never take these factors into account. Hence, they're pretty pointless.

So, how do you solve this problem?

When you review a device, you give a score between 1 and 5 (or whatever) on various aspects, such as performance, battery life, camera, internal storage, or whatever. Then you allow each user to select features that are most/least important to them, and you display for them a 'best of' list tailored to their own preferences. Maybe you could even allow users to rate the phones they own based on the criteria, so you could see how users are rating phones in aggregate.

Basically what I'm talking about is like before elections, there are sites that have 'wizards' where they ask you questions about how you feel in regard to various issues, and then they display a list of candidates that best match your own political views. IMO, this would be MUCH more useful than the generic reviews you currently run. (I don't mean to imply you shouldn't review stuff, just that it's kind of frustrating for me to see some sites ding a phone's score because it's not made of aluminum and/or the reviewer thinks it's ugly, while ignoring the fact that the internal storage options are paltry.)

PS: If by some miracle you actually implemented such functionality, PLEASE make sure that amulti-colored LED is on the list. I said earlier that 16gb is a deal breaker for me, and so is any phone that doesn't work with Lightflow.

 

[B. Diddy]

That's an interesting thought. You're right, it's never a one-size-fits-all. But in any field, there will always be professional reviewers who have a lot of experience and will give their opinions on what the best of anything is. People get to know individual reviewers and what they tend to like, so you can use that as a criteria in itself. For example, when it comes to movies, I would have been more likely to pay attention to a Roger Ebert review than any New Yorker review, because I like fun movies and so did Roger Ebert, while the New Yorker writers would tend to scoff at any movie that wasn't some Eastern Latvian cinema verite documentary about coal workers.

In addition, the AC reviews usually list their pros and cons, which can touch on some of those at-a-glance items that may be important to an individual reader.