It’s Time To Make Standardized Ratings For Gadgets [Gadgets]

Earlier today, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed off stickers that will give car buyers standardized info on a selected model’s fuel economy and environmental impact. Gadgets need to have standardized ratings, too.

When buying gadgets, comparison is paramount. There are inevitably a hundred TVs that fit the final requirements you’ve set out, a couple of dozen Blu-ray players, and a handful of smartphones. In many cases, it ends up being a technique of elimination, and standardized gadget ratings would be certain that that process was a good and informed one.

As our society comes to terms with the direness of our energy situation, and as the theory of ” green” transforms from buzzy marketing bullshit to something that our gadgets actually need to be, it is going to be essential to have real, digestible data on how the electronics we use impact our environment. Some considerations here could include:

• Power consumption: how much gadgets use after they’re plugged in and operating; how much they use after they’re plugged in and not being used.
• Materials: how environmentally friendly are the materials used in a product.
• Supply chain: under what conditions were the products manufactured, and from what countries did their parts originate.
• Durability: what number use cycles a product could be expected to last for.
• Disposability: how long a product, or its packaging, will take to degrade in various situations.

Some terms and standards for addressing these issues are already floating around. ” Vampire draw” is a more colorful option to discuss the ability our gadgets quietly suck while they’re plugged in but not in use, and since 1992 Energy Star has been giving consumers a vague notion that their products were using gobbling up slightly less energy than they may be. But once you walked into a Best Buy and asked the folks inside-the folks buying things and the folk selling them-what standards were required of any given product for it to bear the Energy Star sticker, what percentage of them would have any clue? Not very many, I imagine.

Specs

Green stats are only the start; similar standardized ratings could overhaul the way in which we evaluate all our devices’ specs. Sure, a number of the ones you possibly can consider when buying a new gadget are objective: Megapixels. Processor speeds. Screen sizes. But why will we blindly trust the firms that make our gadgets to faithfully report things like battery life? Why can we need to place confidence in websites to run benchmarks for every new machine that comes out? Listed below are only a few things that may be tested by a third party:

• Battery life: standardized tests for varied usage scenarios. For a music player this is able to mean playing straight through, on shuffle, or selecting particular songs and scrubbing to a specific moment.
• Benchmarks: tests for CPUs and GPUs.
• Power on and shut down times: tests that could show how long various models take to switch on completely, shut down completely, go into a nap state, wake up from a nap state, etc.
• Display: a standardized test for brightness, color reproduction, etc.
• Wireless reception: how strong of a signal devices get with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.
• Noise: how loud larger products like desktops, appliances, etc. are while operating.

Things like stock specs and Energy Star standards are a start, but only that. Establishing standardized tests for aspects of performance and gear consumption-and, perhaps, as the EPA has suggested for the automobile industry, assigning a letter grade based on those numbers-would help keep consumers informed and firms honest.

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This post is tagged: Gadgets, its, ratings, Standardized, Time