iPhone, Galaxy, iPad, Nexus: Here’s how they really rate

“Much as changed since we developed our criteria and weightings [for mobile devices] four years ago,” Galen Gruman writes for InfoWorld. “We saw an explosion of functionality for much of that period, so the average score climbed regularly — until it was no longer average. And in the last year, there’s been a real slowdown in mobile innovation, creating a plateau in our scores.”

“We saw an explosion of functionality for much of that period, so the average score climbed regularly — until it was no longer average. And in the last year, there’s been a real slowdown in mobile innovation, creating a plateau in our scores,” Gruman writes. “Then there’s been the explosion of services in each platform — Apple’s iCloud and Siri, or Google’s Google Now and Maps, for example — as mobile devices have moved from being stand-alone endpoints to part of a computing fabric in which mobile devices are one endpoint among many. Our old scoring system didn’t anticipate the rise of platform services.”

“We’ve tossed our old scoring system for mobile devices and developed a new one that both resets the average and creates headroom for those areas where we foresee innovation making the most strides,” Gruman writes, “Below, you can see the new scores for the major smartphones and tablets now on the market.”

InfoWorld Test Center mobile device scroes

Much more, including explanations of InfoWorld’s new categories, in the full article here.

11 Comments

  1. And on the original site, Fandroids are foaming at the mouth…. (big surprise there).

    There used to be a time (some 15 years ago) when on the early renditions of online tech forums, you would have a Mac – Win debate, and rabid Apple fans would be crusading against the overwhelming majority of Winows drones (I’m not talking about who was right or wrong; just the tone and general sentiment of the discussion).

    Today, the Apple community is largely mainstream, calm and articulate. On the other side, though, we have this new community of fandroid zealots that puts Apple evangelism of late 90s to shame in their pure, unwavering, blind dogmatic zeal. It is thoroughly amusing to watch.

    1. I must have gone through a black hole of late because in my memory it was endless win drones who occupied the forums (or indeed the real world) lecturing us about needing urgent re education if we even dared to mentioned we used a Mac.

  2. Those are some crazy numbers. The iPad air gets a 7 for hardware. It’s almost perfect. I can’t be bothered to read the article after seeing that. Just made up numbers.

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