Q: I need some advice on buying a new smart phone. Got any ideas where I might look?
A: Indeed I do! The folks at Consumer Reports magazine have been testing, rating, and reviewing consumer products for 70 years. The magazine is published by a nonprofit organization, and it accepts no advertising, so you know it’s unbiased.
DCCC students have free access to Consumer Reports going all the way back to 1991, but for information on smart phones, you want something very recent. Here’s how to get the latest:
- From deleGATE, click the Library tab, then click Find Articles–Databases.
- Under “General Research,” click MasterFile Premier via EBSCO.
- Enter Consumer Reports in the first empty box, and in the “Select a Field” menu to its right, choose SO Journal Name.
- In the second empty box enter Smart Phones. Don’t worry about selecting a field to its right.
- Hit Search; you’ll get 26 articles from Consumer Reports reviewing smart phones.
- To see the most recent articles first, click Relevance Sort and choose Date Descending from the list. Click PDF Full Text to read the article.
The first two articles in the list will be the 2012 smart phone buying guide, and a report on smart phones from December 2011. How’s that for up to date?
Q: That’s pretty good, but it’s too many steps for me to get there. I think I’ll just Google “Smart Phone Reviews.”
A: That’ll work too. But check this out: 12 of the 13 results on the first page of that Google search take you to websites with advertisements. And guess what most of those ads are for? Smart phones.
How unbiased is that?
