111–120 of 400 posts
…And on ones that do. Looks very useful for weeding out actual quality from the muddle. Would love to see someone doing this kind of work with other types of cables, too.
http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-ap...
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Personally, I filter out one and five star reviews. To me, five stars means when you use the product, Jesus appears before you. One star means I ordered a cable and received a dead crab instead (pretty sure there's an XKCD that covers the last one). But others don't agree with my rating system, so "ordered blue, but it was robin egg blue. Werst company evar!!!11" means one star. Five stars means "I work for the compa…
Really? If a product meets your needs, is a fair price, and seems to be working fine after 30 days, you would not give it 5 stars? It would need to perform miracles to get 5 stars?
And then along comes the cable which, when I plug it in, causes a religious miracle to occur. How do I rate that one? Five stars is already taken. (Or maybe it should be two stars. I want to get my work done without being distracted by a prominent religious figure appearing next to my desk.)
To put it another way, when I purchase something I expect that it will work fine after 30 days and that it meets my needs. That doesn't warrant five stars. That's three stars: does what I expected, doesn't suck but doesn't stand out from the rest all that much. If it were half the price of cables of equal quality, then I'd give it five stars. But IMO the product has to be outstanding in some way to warrant five stars, otherwise why have a rating system at all?
OTOH, Amazon doesn't help with this. Click on "critical reviews" on Amazon, and three star reviews are listed. That's just broken. Three stars is middle of the road, not outstanding in anyway but not deficient, either.
So, no, given your parameters, I would not rate the item five stars. I realize the rest of the world doesn't agree with me, and I'm loathe to participate in such a skewed system (everyone gets a trophy). My concession is I'll give four stars to something I'd normally give three stars, just so it doesn't show up in the "critical review" section, broken as that might be.
I see no reason why to buy anything but Anker. I once tried to purposely destroy an Anker MicroUSB cable (bought a 5 pack that had three 3ft, one 6ft, one 1ft, didn't need the 1ft), by grabbing the head of it with clamping pliers and yanking the fuck out of it with the cable wrapped around my hand, and bending it to near 180 degrees repeatedly for about 5 minutes. I could not kill it without straight up taking wire c…
I bought a bunch of their external battery packs (aprox 15 of them) and none of those have failed)
This is such a great service to everyone! I wish more companies let their engineers do that. Too few knowledgeable people call out the crap we're being sold.
I don't think we know if Google "let" him yet. Most companies have very strong policies against things like this...
Sound alike the whole reason is to make their device owners able to make better choices.
The current rhetoric when it comes to the failings of online reviews is to point at fraudulent reviews. I posit that, rather, it's the lack of weighting reviews by the expertise of the reviewers. Clearly the reviews of a hardware engineer at Google should have more weight to them than an average consumer (on products like this), because as bkmartin points out, the average consumer has no idea as to the true quality o…
When buying something online, I make a habit of reading a couple of the negative reviews. Sometimes they're, "I meant to buy a toaster, and misclicked on this television instead. Makes poor toast. 2/5." But sometimes they're more like, "It worked great for two years, and then became sentient and strangled my pet fish. 2/5" Rating distributions only tell you part of the story.
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I've also started buying Anker exclusively. Their chargers work with every device at full-rate, and their cables are decent. I have had the clips break on a couple of MicroUSB cables, including the 1ft from a similar 5-pack. I had my phone attached to a battery pack and stuffed both in my pocket. The stress of bending the cable in strange directions messed up the clips on the cable. Not quite bulletproof, but not bad…
> Not quite bulletproof, but not bad (and I was lucky I didn't damage the phone instead). This is one reason why I don't mind if the cables aren't that difficult to break. I'd rather the cable break than my devices.
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It's probably true, since the Play store only sells one variety of cable, and Google has probably actually vetted it. In which case I can only see that suggestion as a helpful bit of advice for avoiding problems.
Yeah, no pitchfork in hand here, but I also wouldn't be surprised if Amazon didn't appreciate that sort of activity.
What I find interesting here is that Benson is essentially using his employer as a reputation guarantor. I guess depending on the company's HR that could fall either way of a) This is great, we're getting nice PR b) Mr Benson, we need to have a quiet word about what it is you do here and what Google is not in the business of. Really interesting. edit: I assumed this is part of his job. I just find the publishing of t…
This is very common among Googlers, and it bugs me because so many buy into it without further question, but in every case here, the reviewer also includes a detailed analysis describing how he came to his conclusion, rather than merely implying authority, and his reference to Google seems only to be in his capacity as working on a product team that might explicitly care about quality of accessories in a first genera…
Depends on how busy the HR dept is I guess.
These reviews took me back (and made me laugh). They have the same to-the-point-and-technically-correct tone as code reviews internal to Google. In all seriousness though, these are important for a non-obvious reason: Nexus 6x devices don't ship with USB2-USB3 adapters (they only have a USB3 cable with a wall charger). So ... anyone who wants to hook up their Nexus 6x to a laptop will almost certainly to Amazon to bu…
Moment of irony when I realized my new Nexus is the only Android device I own, that I cannot develop apps on. Short of sending apk's over wifi to sideload. (Because of the USB) Looking forward to laptops with USB C connectors.
Surprisingly it's been slow! I was very sad to see, for instance, that MS Surface Book does not have a USB C port. It is the single reason that I'm not going to buy the Surface Book.
At least Apple went all in with the Macbook air. Also, I think iPhone 7 will use the USB 3.1 type C port.
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Not really. I can buy super cheap micro-USB cables that work perfectly. This seems to happen all the time when there's a new standard out. The disreputable companies whip together something shoddy and try to get those early sales before more reputable companies can move in. Meanwhile, companies like Amazon do nothing to stop this obvious fraud. Amazon should be stopping these sales. Also, its disingenuous to pretend…
Arguably though, if a USB cable is $20 through Google, and $2 through an off-brand, I may want two of them, but buy six and consider any that don't work or stop working disposable. And still be saving money over buying from Google. Consumers need to be aware of the risks they take when they buy bargain brand, but it doesn't negate the benefits of having bargain brand available.