How does PhoneArena rate the phones?

How does PhoneArena rate the phones?:

As you all know, every single feature on PhoneArena.com is accessible and absolutely free of charge to the visitors. We have never partnered with a third party intending to lure the audience into believing that purchasing a product or paying for a service will be beneficial. We do, however, allow paid advertisements in order to cover the expenses related to keeping the site up (hosting, staff, equipment, etc.). Therefore, it should be clear that it is in our best interest to keep our visitors and attract new ones, by providing the most unbiased phone reviews as soon as a device is made available to us. Nevertheless, we have to express our opinion about the units we are testing in terms of design, ease of use, functions, and features and compare them to other devices. In other words, we have to rate the cell phones we review. There have been many users, which seem to be unhappy with the ratings we give specific phones and we decided that they deserve a detailed explanation of the process. The PhoneArena’s Team consists of professional individuals with passion for mobile phones and extensive experience in the field as well. Every device that falls in our hands gets inspected to the smallest detail, regardless of brand, class and features. You should understand that when rating a specific device, we take under consideration the following factors:

Class: The class of each cell phone is defined by the targeted customers’ preferences regarding the cost, the luxury level, the multimedia features and so on. We rate the phones depending on the class they are in, and that is why e.g. lack of high-tech features is not a problem for luxury or budget phones. You are probably wondering why some entry-level phones have the same excellent scores as the latest top shelf camera-phone. This means that they both are very good, but only for their class. Could you compare a convertible with an SUV? Not really, because obviously they belong to different classes and are intended for different purposes. It is the same with cell phones. We do not compare CDMA with GSM phones, either.

Carrier: If a phone is offered by a carrier, it is only compared to the rest of the devices that fall in the same class and are offered by the same wireless provider. This means that you shouldn’t compare the rating of a Verizon Wireless cell phone with the one of a phone from Sprint’s or T-Mobile’s lineup, for example.

Release date: A phone released a year ago and rated as excellent should not be compared to a device that has just came out and has received the same rating. As the technology evolves, it is logical that the new models should meet higher expectations.

We have decided to rate the various devices from 1 to 10 with 1 being the worst. Here’s what every figure means:

8.5-10 – Excellent : the performance and the features offered by the device are superb.

6.5-8.5 – Good : this rating indicates a device with above average performance and features, which has minor drawbacks.

4.5-6.5 – Average : this is an average device, which performs decently and will satisfy the general consumer preferences.

2.5-4.5 – Poor : A cell phone with major drawbacks.

0.5–2.5 – Terrible : The weak points of this device surmount dramatically its useful features. Run away from it.