About

Most products are mediocre. That isn't cynicism, it's arithmetic, the overwhelming bulk of everything ever made is fine at best, and a fair amount of it is actively worse than owning nothing at all. I'm Adam Arnold, and I review them anyway, on the off chance one turns out to be good. Occasionally one is. You'll know, because the tone changes.

I review whatever I've ended up with, supermarket sandwiches, robot vacuums, films I regret, the odd Turkish bathhouse. There's no beat and no remit. If you want exhaustive coverage of every phone released this quarter, there are content farms for that, staffed by people who held the thing for an afternoon and called it long-term. This isn't that.

How I Review

Everything here is based on actually living with the thing, days, weeks, more often months. I buy it myself, which is both a point of principle and the reason I'm perpetually skint. Nothing gets reviewed off a press release, a spec sheet, or a fifteen-minute fondle at a launch event with warm wine.

Where it's warranted I keep going long after most reviews have filed and moved on, ten months into a games console, a year into a pair of boots. Anything can impress for an afternoon. What matters is whether it's still any good once the novelty has worn off and it's just another object in the house.

Scores are out of 10, and they answer one question: is this worth your money and your time? Not how many features it has. A £3 thing that does its job can, and routinely does, outscore a £400 thing that doesn't.

Independence

The site is independent and self-funded, which is a polite way of saying nobody would fund it. Reviews aren't shaped by advertisers, brands, or affiliate kickbacks, largely because there aren't any. Whatever ads turn up are served by Google AdSense and have precisely nothing to do with the scores. On the rare occasion a brand sends something over, you'll be told, and it won't buy them a kinder verdict.

The Site

Hand-built by jaarnie with Next.js and Ruby on Rails, and running, in one form or another, since 2014. Long enough that the earliest reviews are best left undisturbed.

For formal review standards, see Editorial Policy. To get in touch, visit Contact.