How can you be a fanboy and a reviewer of the product at the same time?
How can you expect consumer technology product makers to give you their latest gizmos for early reviews if you’ve called their last release “not worth the buy”?
I’ve always been fascinated by the world of technology product reviewers and curious about how well can they serve the massive community relying on their recommendations before buying anything.
It’s a world where the likes of Walt Mossberg and David Pogue have battled the dilemmas of fanboy versus independent reviewer.
For this episode of Outliers, I travelled to Hyderabad to sit down with Amit Bhawani, the founder of PhoneRadar. After listening to him, I realised that he, too, fights the good battles of journalism. The latest being a ban imposed by Samsung after he cracked a joke in a recent review.
“It’s come to a point where I don’t like any product in the absolute sense. There’s something wrong with every product,” he says.
Over the next few months, we will bring you conversations with some of India’s most influential technology product reviewers to help understand their world, the battles they fight, questions of ethics, and their view of the future.
Stay tuned and, meanwhile, enjoy this conversation with Bhawani as much as I did.
Subscribe to FactorDaily
Our daily brief keeps thousands of readers ahead of the curve. More signals, less noise.
To get more stories like this on email, click here and subscribe to our daily brief.
Disclosure: FactorDaily is owned by SourceCode Media, which counts Accel Partners, Blume Ventures, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Jay Vijayan and Girish Mathrubootham among its investors. Accel Partners and Blume Ventures are venture capital firms with investments in several companies. Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the founder of Paytm. Jay Vijayan and Girish Mathrubootham are entrepreneurs and angel investors. None of FactorDaily’s investors has any influence on its reporting about India’s technology and startup ecosystem.
