Our latest approach to improving Pickr’s reviews is to build an app to measure phone battery life reliably and consistently. We plan to release it for all reviewers soon.
At Pickr, we’re all about making our little web presence better, and finding ways to better convey what we write about. It’s part of our “Betterment Program”, as we attempt to make our site better overall, and deliver improvements to how technology stories connect with audiences.
Not just “yet another technology blog”, we want the publication to stand out and say “we’re different”, opting for more interaction in our stories and a lack of ads.
Over the past few years, one of the approaches we’ve been using is to improve standards and methodologies. We already state our methodologies up front, and you can find them in every review before you push on into the analysis. It’s important.
But a reviewer’s job is never done and we’re always trying to improve things.
For our latest effort, we’ve turned to making phone reviews a little clearer and more consistent in regards to battery life testing.
As it is, reviewing phone battery life is usually built from real world use, but since every day is a little bit different, real world use can be difficult to keep consistent.
So we’ve been working on a potential fix: our own battery benchmarking app.
Pickr BatteryBench is an app for Android and iOS designed to run with screen usage always-on and internet activity off, keeping the phone on flight mode and measuring screen time in an always-on capacity. In short, BatteryBench provides a metric that we can judge battery life consistently on.
While the idea of using your phone only as a screen is unlikely, especially beyond a flight, this app and approach provides a metric for analysis, much like how synthetic benchmarks provide a metric for performance.
What’s more, some phone makers (such as Apple) use a video viewing metric to determine battery longevity, so this allows us to test those claims in an automated way. We won’t need to lock a phone in a cupboard to test whether the battery matches those claims, and we know what the app is doing (because it’s our app).
As such and from now on, Pickr is aiming to include two sets of mobile phone battery tests when reviewing phones: usage based on our real-world testing of the phone, and a screen rundown time from the BatteryBench app.
Much like our publicly available sound tests (which anyone can check out and listen to), BatteryBench is an approach we hope to make publicly available for other reviewers in the near future.
