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Insider Picks published a guide to the best affordable tablets. Part of that guide is a "BI Rating," a ten-point scale aimed at providing a rough estimate of our own opinions mixed with those of other tablet reviewers across the web.
Here's how we came to those BI Ratings, and the tablets we chose in general.
Much like the process we use for our other buying guides, the tablets included on the list aren't necessarily the four highest-scoring ones overall. We chose those four based on a mixture of feedback from professional and user reviews across the web, and our own hands-on experience.
Once we narrowed our original shortlist — which consisted of around 10 relatively well-received tablets — down to four, we then assigned them a BI Rating, which takes various sources' opinions into account.
Those sources include CNET, PCMag, LaptopMag, and TrustedReviews.
We took the opinions of many, many other tablet reviewing outlets — as well as user reviews on Amazon — into account as we made our picks, but these four were more or less the only ones who've been up-to-date enough with their reviews to give us a wider general score. Device preference is always subjective, but professionals generally tend to agree when something is good or bad.
To get the numerical value for a specific tablet, we did the following:
- Multiplied its star rating on CNET, PCMag, and/or TrustedReviews by two, wherever applicable.
- Added TrustedReviews' rating out of 10.
- Added our own BI Rating out of 10.
- Took the resulting sum and divided it by the number of sources that reviewed the tablet in the first place. The iPad mini 2 was rated by all of the above sources (including us), for instance, so its total review score at this point in the process was divided by five.
- Rounded the new resulting number to the nearest whole number.
So, going back to the iPad mini 2, it received scores of 9 (4.5 x 2 from CNET), 9 (4.5 x 2 from PCMag), 8 (4 x 2 from LaptopMag), 9 (out of 10 from TrustedReviews), and 9 (out of 10 from us). The resulting 44 was divided by 5 to get 8.8. We then rounded up get our final BI Rating of 9 out of 10.
Like any system that tries to distill personal opinion into a number, this has its flaws. Our personal score often differed from the BI Rating by a number or two, and some tablets on the list weren't formally reviewed by some sources. And it's not like we're not going to highlight any low-scoring devices in a buying guide.
However, ratings make things simple, so if we were going to have one, we wanted one that reflected the ideas of many tastes, not just our own. Again, device preference is mostly a subjective thing, so it seemed right to include as many insights as possible.
These buying guides are by no means static, and we plan on updating them in the future. We may always update our BI Rating metric as well, but for now, we hope that clears up any potential confusion. Thanks for reading.