How We Test, Review, and Rate on TechRadar

Independent, authoritative testing — that's our unwavering commitment to you.

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Our Mission: Your Trusted Tech Guides

Our goal is straightforward: to serve as your ultimate technology experts. We aim to be your primary resource for tech purchasing advice, practical usage tips, and valuable long-term insights, all designed to help you discover the best technology and maximize its potential.

We take immense pride in our independence and the thoroughness of our review-testing methodology. We commit long-term attention to the products we assess, ensuring our reviews are consistently updated and maintained—irrespective of a device's original release date. If a product is still available for purchase, it remains firmly on our radar.

Globally, we've brought together some of the planet's most distinguished technology journalists. They are not only masters in their respective fields but are also precisely the audience we craft our reviews for: individuals eager to learn about and utilize the latest and greatest technology.

Our editorial integrity is robustly supported by Future Publishing, one of the world's largest technology publishers. This backing empowers us to share our honest opinions about any product, without any bias or apprehension.

For more insights into TechRadar, please explore ourAbout Uspage.

Understanding Our Star Rating System

To ensure clarity and ease of understanding, we employ a familiar five-star rating system: more stars signify higher quality.

Our Detailed Scoring Criteria

Products are evaluated against a variety of specific criteria, tailored to the attributes of each product type. Each criterion is assigned a score out of 5, for instance:

From Scorecard to Final Rating

At the conclusion of every review, you’ll find a scorecard detailing our ratings for each section. While these individual scores contribute significantly to our final star rating for a product, they may not always align perfectly.

Our seasoned reviewers consider both the scorecard ratings and the unique subtleties of each product to determine its ultimate star rating, which is prominently displayed at the top of the review.

TechRadar's star rating system offers a quick guide on whether we recommend a product. However, we consistently advise you to read our comprehensive reviews to ascertain if a product truly suits your specific requirements.

The final star rating is out of five, and reviewers have the discretion to award half-star ratings if they believe a product sits between two whole-star scores.

TechRadar Product Awards

TechRadar presents four distinct product awards:

Hands-on Reviews vs. Full Product Reviews

We publish two distinct article types titled 'review': 'hands-on reviews' and 'full product reviews.' It's crucial to understand the difference between them.

Hands-on reviewscapture a journalist's initial impressions of a device after spending some time with it, which could range from a few moments to several hours.

The key aspect is that we have personally interacted with the product, enabling us to provide an early sense of its user experience, even if it's an initial perspective.

We use the term 'review' for these articles partly because they convey a genuine opinion based on direct usage, and also because readers increasingly search for 'reviews' when seeking early insights into new products.

However, hands-on reviews are distinct fromfull product reviews. Our full product reviews are exclusively based on the final, released version of a product, subjected to thorough testing and benchmarking. These reviews always include a comprehensive verdict and a definitive score.

Our Team of Expert Reviewers

Our reviewers are specialists, each possessing deep expertise in a particular technology sector. With decades of combined experience in evaluating technology, our team has consistently engaged with, lived, and reviewed tech since TechRadar's inception in 2007.

For instance, our US Editor-in-Chief, Lance Ulanoff, brings over 30 years of experience as a technology journalist from prominent outlets like Mashable and PCMag. Similarly, UK Editor-in-Chief Marc McLaren has more than 20 years of tech publishing experience with sites such as Tom's Guide and Stuff.

However, these examples merely hint at the breadth of our diverse and expansive global team, which spans four continents, 14 countries, and 11 different languages.

This collective expertise results in a team with an almost encyclopedic understanding of their covered areas. This ensures our reviews not only deliver an in-depth understanding of each product but also crucial broader context, equipping you with precisely the information needed for informed purchasing decisions.

As our writers are specialists, they maintain continuous engagement with the communities they cover. This enables our experts to accurately compare and rate products against others of the same type.

TechRadar exclusively commissions reviews from individuals possessing the required level of expertise, whether they are members of our in-house writing team or external experts brought in when necessary.

This means if you read a review of a home theater system on TechRadar, you can be confident it was evaluated by a home theater expert, not a mobile phone specialist.

Our Testing Methodology

We prioritize real-world testing over laboratory conditions, as products are ultimately used in everyday environments. Nevertheless, we benchmark every product that is sold based on specific performance indicators.

To delve deeper,discover more about our comprehensive testing procedures.