Slashdot Mirror
Phablet Reviews: Before and After the iPhone 6
Velcroman1 writes Bigger is better. No, wait, bigger is worse. Well, which is it? Apple's newly supersized 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and the jumbo, 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus are a marked departure for the company, which has clung to the same, small screen size for years. It has gone so far as to publicly deride larger phones from competitors, notably Samsung, even as their sales grew to record highs. Tech reviewers over the years have tended to side with Apple, in general saddling reviews of the Samsung Galaxy Note – a 5.3-inch device that kicked off the phablet push in 2012 – with asides about how big the darn thing was. Are tech reviewers being fair when they review the iPhone 6 Plus? Here's what some of them said today, compared with how they reviewed earlier phablets and big phones from the competition.
The press is biased towards Apple? You don't say...
This seems to be a typical sort of response from a media that tends to bias Apple products. I make no criticism of Apple with that remark, only those responsible for reviewing their products fairly. I get the feeling that a huge number of these reviewers, rather that being classical "tech lovers" if you will, are more prone to have a brand or ecosystem identity that drives their judgement about a given product or product family.
This kind of trend is fairly common across all major phone manufacturers, across both iOS and Android, and also across Apple and Google themselves. It is why I rarely take a phone review seriously, be it for a phone that I actually am interested in or one that I'm not. Having information about specs and hardware is a good place to start when deciding between two pieces of technology, but past that, a huge amount of one's enjoyment of a device can come from external factors, such as previous brand investment, ecosystem size and saturation, and even things as "trivial" as what one's friends are using.
I try not to be terribly upset when I see Apple product reviewers exhibiting these signs of bias, since a large number of Android (and perhaps even some windows phone?) reviewers do the same things. I read and watch these reviews as I would watch news about politics: with a boulder sized grain of salt. While some truth may be found somewhere in the reviewer's statements, they still can and do fall prey to human shortcomings that affects us all.
Hipster doesn't like new thing. News at 11.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wait, I thought hipsters were the guys who liked the new things? Like if you had an iPad and an iPhone you were a hipster, but if you had an old Android and a Lenovo laptop you were a legitimate human being.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
It’s still too big for a smartphone After testing it over the past week and a half, the awkwardness that came with carrying such a large, “notice me” phone outweighed the benefits of it, for me.
And then about the iPhone 6 plus:
Maybe I’m getting old, and my eyes are getting worse. Or maybe I’m stuck in Apple’s reality-distortion field (help). But something strange happened this week. I started to like a phablet.
And they feel comfortable making damning statements about a non Apple device, while saying the same thing as politely as possible for the iPhone. E.g. compare a TechCrunch quote on the Note:
I found that it was really difficult to get comfortable with the device, never feeling like I had complete control over it as I would with a smaller phone.
With that on the iPhone:
the additional size makes for a less ‘perfect’ ergonomic quality, something the iPhone 6 definitely achieves
The worst they can say about the iPhone 6 plus is "less perfect", while adding that the iPhone 6 IS perfect. Until one month ago, of course, the iPhone 5/5S was the ergonomically perfect one, while Samsung Galaxy S3/4/5 where awkwardly large. I guess perfection just follows Apple wherever they go. "Journalists" just follow right behind.
It's news to Apple