The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships so we may get a share of the revenue from your purchase.
Insider Picks publishes guides to the best available smartwatches. Part of those guides is a "BI Rating," a ten-point scale aimed at providing a rough estimate of our own opinions mixed with those of other smartwatch reviewers across the web.
Here's how we came to those BI Ratings, and the smartwatches we chose in general.
The smartwatches included on the list are not the five highest-scoring overall. We chose those five 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 about 10 well-received watches — down to five, we then assigned them a BI Rating, which takes various sources' opinions into account.
Those sources include The Wirecutter, CNET, PCMag, Digital Trends, TechRadar, and Wareable.
We looked at many, many smartwatch reviewing outlets — and user feedback across the web — but we felt these six were knowledgeable and frequently updated enough to give us a good idea of what's worth considering. Gadget taste is always subjective, but professionals generally tend to agree when something is good or bad.
To get the numerical value for a specific smartwatch, we did the following:
1. Multiplied its star rating on CNET, PCMag, Digital Trends, TechRadar, and/or Wareable by two, wherever applicable.
2. Added our own BI Rating out of 10.
3. Took the resulting sum and divided it by the number of sources that reviewed the given smartwatch in the first place. The Huawei Watch was rated by five of the above sources (including us), for instance, so its total review score at this point in the process was divided by five.
4. Added 0.5 points to the resulting number if The Wirecutter gave the smartwatch positive feedback, if applicable.
5. Rounded the new resulting number to the nearest whole number.
So, going back to the Huawei, the Watch received scores of 7 (3.5 x 2 from CNET), 3 (3.5 x 2 from PCMag), 7 (3.5 x 2 from Wareable), 8 (4 x 2 from Digital Trends), and 8 (out of 10 from us). The resulting 37 was divided by 5 to get 7.4. The Wirecutter has not given it an official recommendation, so we kept it there. Rounding that down then got us the BI Rating of 7 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 smartwatches on the list weren't formally reviewed by some sources. And it's not like we're not going to highlight many 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, gadget preference is a subjective thing, so we wanted to include as many insights as possible.
These buying guides are by no means static, and we plan on updating them in the future. It's likely we'll be updating our BI Rating metric as well, but for now, we hope that clears up any potential confusion. Thanks for reading.