When the iPhone 5 came out last year, its market release was accompanied by large crowds and long lines at the Apple stores. Following almost immediately, reviews about the product surfaced on major websites. More than a few of those reviews claimed to be along the lines of “comprehensive” and “in-depth“.
The same thing happened when the iPhone 5S was released this September. Launch, followed by a stampede of reviews.
Notice a pattern here? This phenomenon doesn’t happen with just phones, gadgets, or software. Virtually every time a new product is introduced to the market, reviews come in droves, and they come in nipping on the heels of the release. I like to call such reviews instant-gratification reviews (IG reviews), as they offer consumers an immediate run-down of a product’s features, strengths, and weaknesses.
As much as these reviews claim comprehensiveness or thoroughness, they are anything but. Sure, any reviewer can claim that he or she checked everything from the screen quality to battery life to shock absorption. This is not the problem with the reviews.
The real problem with IG reviews is the sparse amount of time the reviewer has spent evaluating the product. If a review is published six hours after the product is released, that means less than six hours have been put into testing the product. In fact, with the time needed to write, proofread, and complete the review, the testing time may have been less than four hours.
Now let’s be real, who buys a new product and only uses it for four hours? This is exactly the flawed mentality of IG reviewers. Their reviews account only for how the product performs within its first few hours, and assume that it will hold for the long-term. This is simply not true. Take for example, the Xbox 360. While there were a flurry of reviews that came out following its release, none of these reviews predicted the three red rings of death (RRoD). For the majority of users, the RRoD problems didn’t surface until months after the purchase. Four hours worth of testing isn’t going to find this problem.
Can we argue then, that the definition of “comprehensive review” should encompass time elapsed as well as scope of features tested? After all, people buy products for long-term use, and the reviews should talk about how a product holds up over the course of several months and years. Hasty reviews are equivalent to listening to thirty seconds of a song and critiquing the entire album. No matter how attentively he or she listens, the listener’s critique will be narrow and misrepresentative of the big picture. To that end, reviewers must put more time into testing and evaluating products. As for the consumers, avoid the IG reviews and ask a friend who has owned the product for a long time. They will be a more reliable source than the reviewer who carelessly scrambles for publication.
