Poll: Review scores - what matters most to YOU?

Buying a new phone can be a challenge, especially when you have to navigate the myriad of options out there to find the phone that’s most suited to you. Over the past 18 months, we’ve been working on an all-new reviews process here at Android Authority and if you’ve followed our Best of Android series, as well as recent articles such as the OnePlus 5 Battery Life review, you’ll have seen a short glimpse into some of the new format. Now, as we near the official launch of our all-new reviews process, we need YOUR help!

We’ve finalised our testing and the last piece of the puzzle we’re working on is how we score devices. There’s two methods we’re considering and both use all of the data we’ve collected through testing, but how we score and rank devices is where we’d like your input! After all, our reviews are designed to help you make the best purchase possible and we want to ensure we’re providing scores that actually matter to you!

There’s two types of scoring we’re considering and both are relative to all the other devices we’ve tested. The first method uses scoring that takes the actual results of the testing and attributes a score relative to the actual data of other devices we’ve tested. The pitfall of this method is that outliers such as a phone with an insanely large battery life will result in misleading disparities in scores.

The second method is to apply scoring according to how the devices rank against each other. As an example, a phone with 10 hours of battery life might be the top result (and get 10 out of 10), but a phone with 7 hours could be second on the list and, assuming we’ve tested 100 devices, it would get a score of 99 (or equivalent). The obvious pitfall here is that the score doesn’t tell you how much better or worse a phone is, rather just that it is better.

Now we’ve explained that, we want to know what matters to YOU. What helps you most when deciding to buy a phone? Do you want to know the actual data, or how a phone ranks against the competition? Or a combination of the both? Vote in the polls and let us know in the comments below and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on!