Here’s something different: PC Magazine in an article by Jim Louderback, entitled “Ten to AvoidThe Worst Products of the Year “, nominates ten products for a putative ‘Gadget Hall of Shame’. Four of those items are listed below:
- Concord 5062AF Digital Camera
- iPAQ rz1715 PDA
- Samsung D415 Mobile Phone
- VoodooPC Envy m:380 Notebook
What caught my eye was that PC Mag states that the Voodoo “barely even beat Sony’s lame VAIO A190″. And, ironically, in an earlier posting, we had quoted Wired Test as saying that the A190 was the “best multimedia notebook”.
What’s up with that? How could two well-respected Ezines have such divergent opinions about the same thing?
In lieu of buying an A190 and evaluating it myself, I performed a meta-analysis of opinions and reviews available on the net. What I found was that the average opinion of the A190 is almost exactly ½ way between the ratings from Wired Test and PC Magazine. From this I conclude that PC Magazine is too hard on the products they review, and that Wired is too easy (….well, at least in this case). Certainly, of the reviews published in Wired Test, there seemed to be an inordinate number of perfect (5/5) product scores, thus supporting the impression that Wired inflates their ratings.
Data…
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
The only trouble with a hall of shame is that so many of the worst gadgets are forgotten soon after they hit the marketplace, so readers might not be familiar with them at all.
That’s why it’s so important to read multiple reviews, so you can balance out overly positive reviews with overly negative ones.