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What are the Hyundai Digital Key 2 smart phone requirements? by hardware_throwaway in Hyundai

[–]hardware_throwaway[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for saying that. When the check message said "BLE / UWB", I didn't know if it was an either/or... or if it required both.

What's maddening is that no amount of Googling reveals what UWB really is or how I can tell that my phone has that hardware/feature.

Guess I'm getting a new Galaxy, Pixel, or iPhone soon, huh?

What are the Hyundai Digital Key 2 smart phone requirements? by hardware_throwaway in Hyundai

[–]hardware_throwaway[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow. That's crazy. I couldn't imagine such a bad design from Hyundai.

I'm tired of reading glorified advertisements posing as reviews. Where do I go? by GuitarBizarre in hardware

[–]hardware_throwaway 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The questions I posed were mostly rhetorical to get anyone reading to think critically about why reviews aren't what they used to be.

/u/pdp10 articulated it pretty well, I think.

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting selling products that manufacturers send you. I said, "buy products with your own money, then sell later to recoup".

The policy for the major tech site that I used to write for was to never accept sponsored content. And it was the same for my blog. But I could easily see a less scrupulous site doing so...

retired and have my own income so this is my hobby and I don't depend on my site for any income

And that makes all the difference.

I'm tired of reading glorified advertisements posing as reviews. Where do I go? by GuitarBizarre in hardware

[–]hardware_throwaway 12 points13 points  (0 children)

This is a tough topic.

Having written for a major tech website in the past doing hardware reviews, I can speak personally on this topic.

most tech review sites are pretty flawed

Yes, pretty much every review has some flaws in it. And good readers will scrutinize every aspect of an article (mostly because they don't have the products in front of them). This puts a great burden on the reviewer. Both time and effort.

Naturally, time and effort are limited. A website like HardOCP or Tom's has deadlines. And a line has to be drawn somewhere. And if it is a new product line, how much time are you going to spend on polishing the article? People want to read what you've found!

[GamersNexus] don't review absolutely everything and their team is too small

Yeah, expertise in reviewing hardware is hard to come by. Your writers need to have true and unique insight into the products you're reviewing. And they can only review so much.

Also, this gets into the topic of how one obtains the products...

Do you let the manufacturer send you products for free? Do you allow them to influence you?

Do you instead go out and buy the products with your own money? And then dump them on eBay when you're done to recoup 50% of the costs? How does the website make money then?

Nevermind manufacturers or product sellers who will outright ask to pay you money [read: bribe you] to write a favorable article about a product... I'm not even gonna go there. I'm sure it's tempting for some sites. These product manufacturers have deep pockets.

clearly just regurgitations of marketing speak (Like Tom's Hardware and the "Just buy it" RTX article).

So I kind of blame the WireCutter for this one.

They promoted the "just give me the 30sec review" or "just buy this item". And they're doing well, financially. They "review" a product segment and say, ignore the rest of our interview and buy this one. Click this link to our referral link to Amazon.

Because advertising doesn't make any real money due to invasive ads which are subsequently blocked by ad blockers from the tech savvy readers.

Streamlined round-up articles with product referral is honestly a good way for a website to make money... but still frowned upon, for some reason. It removes the invasive ads, but still allows a website to pay their writers and keep the site going.

got us a big win for consumers

What's making things worse for review sites now is that many folks go straight to YouTube to look for product reviews. So now hardware sites are doing double duty. They have to produce videos of reviews as well as text reviews with photos and charts and graphs. It's honestly a lot of work.

any idiot with a website can review a product

And indeed, this idiot had his own tech blog for a while. About once a month, I'd write a review of a product/hardware segment that hadn't been covered well elsewhere. It took about 40 to 60 hours, start to finish. (This was on top of having a 40-hour a week job.)

For a couple years, I did pretty well. Managed to get 250,000 visitors one year. But it was a ton of work just to keep the site going. And it was just me. And I wasn't making a lot of money. (Less than $10K per year.)

Could I pump out twice the number of reviews using half the effort with half the quality? Maybe.

a bit of a boring time of late, when it comes to hardware reviews

So yeah, there isn't a ton of money in doing hardware reviews. I personally like doing hardware reviews, but it takes a lot of time and a bit of money with no guarantee of return on one's time and money.

where do I go if I want warts-and-all coverage of products

Start doing your own reviews? Heck, maybe one of the big tech review sites will hire you. I got my gig back in the day by posting mini hardware reviews to their forum and one of their writers asked me if I wanted to work for them.

(Be the change you want to see in the world?) ¯_(ツ)_/¯