Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by matheusalmeida 5321 days ago
Am I the only one who thinks that a 10/10 is... let's say, hard to believe ? What does that mean? In terms of software, it doesn't have bugs, it's completeley optimized and you have days of battery life and tons of available memory ? Is the integration of all functionalities perfect ? You don't need task managers to kill faulty apps ?

Anyhow, we are in a free world where everyone can make reviews and I'm glad we are in that world.

5 comments

You're not the only one hung up on it, no. But I don't see anything strange about a 10/10 score. It doesn't imply perfection, only relative excellence.

This is how it's always been with game reviews, for instance. A video game released in 1996 gets a 10/10 because it's better than other games yet seen. The same game released today would get panned. It doesn't imply any claim to absolute perfection.

I'm rating this as a 10 in software in the current crop of phones, particularly against other Android offerings. Who knows what this will look like when Windows Phone 8 and iOS 6 are out. -by Joshua Topolsky 6:17 PM

I think it makes sense.

Perhaps some more/better features, better e-mail and Calendar apps, better Maps/Navigation...etc. iOS still feels like a MVP when compared to Android. It may work excellent with the features it does have, but that doesn't mean it isn't more limited.
Grade inflation is rampant in reviews. The dynamic range is really effectively about 6.5/7 to 10. So a 10 actually means something more like 3 stars out of 3.
It might not necessarily be inflation.

Those who write extended reviews are likely to have fairly good intuition about which phones are good enough to write about. Nobody is going to spend days writing a review for a phone that someone would only get because it's "free" with a contract.

Think of it as a 9.7, rounded up.