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How we score our phone reviews

Breaking down our mobile device testing methodology.

Alex Kidman's headshot

By

Alex Kidman

Updated

Here at Finder, we put all the mobile phones we test under a rigorous set of tests to determine their value then break those tests down into broader categories covering phone design, camera quality, overall performance and battery life.

All of these phones are scored on a five-point scale relative to the handsets available at the time of review for each device. This means that if you're comparing a phone from this year to one released two years ago, you can see similar scores, even though logically they are quite different handsets.

To determine the overall score, the reviewer weighs each category score and any other consideration such as price or unique features. It is not an average of the other scores.

Where we use benchmarks as part of the quality assessment, these are run at least three times to gain an average score; any unusual outlier scores are discarded and fresh tests are run if that occurs. We're transparent about the benchmarks that we use and when they were run so you can more easily see how we've come to the conclusions we have.

While our scores reflect the value we give each phone, there is and will always be a level of subjectivity to each review. We're presenting human reviews here, not just a cold mechanical analysis of phone specifications. If you've got experience with a phone and it differs from ours, we'd love to hear from you. We can only review the phones as we get them, so it's quite feasible that some time after our review, software improvements may lead to quite a different handset.
Alex Kidman's headshot
Written by

Senior editor

A multi-award winning journalist, Alex has written about consumer technology for over 20 years. He has written and edited for virtually every Australian tech publication including Gizmodo, CNET, PC Magazine, Kotaku and more. He has also been the Editor of Gizmodo Australia, PC Mag Australia, CNET.com.au and the Tech and Telco section at Finder. Alex has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New England and a serious passion for retro gaming. See full bio

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