Joel Johnson spent several days living with the T-Mobile G1, the first Google Android phone. His review, posted to BB Gadgets, is a deep critique of the product but it also contains a thoughtful meditation on gadget reviews in general. From his post:
Products are not simply loved or hated, but appreciated over time on a scale which terminates with perfection at one extreme, failure to operate at the other. That scale can be broken down in any number of metrics, all of which are useless: what matters to the owner of a product is not where a reviewer, a single sample, has chosen to mark his opinion at an arbitrary point in time on the scale, but in what direction that point is heading. (And to a lesser and murkier degree, for how long that trend will continue.)What's lost in the review – the direction of love – is critical. Like romantic love, a slide towards increasing love helps us overlook flaws, remember only the best aspects of our products' features, and gives the relationship between a product and its owner time to flourish and grow. Hidden delights will show themselves after a time, reinforcing the relationship, even as unaddressed incompatibilities might, after a measure, begin to tilt affection towards declination.
"A few days with the T-Mobile G1, the first Google Android phone"
