Every phone gets five scores out of five, a weighted overall, and one word: strong buy, buy, consider or skip. This page is what those mean and where they come from.
Five categories. The weights are not equal, because what a phone is for is not equal: a battery that dies by evening ruins a phone in a way a middling camera does not.
| Category | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Battery | 25% | Capacity, charging speed, and whether it lasts a day of ordinary use. |
| Performance | 25% | Chipset, memory and the benchmark figures, read against the price band. |
| Display | 20% | Panel type, resolution and refresh rate — an LCD at ₹30,000 scores badly. |
| Camera | 20% | Sensors and lenses the sheet states, not photos we took. |
| Value | 10% | What the same money buys elsewhere today, at today's prices. |
The word is a lookup from the overall score, not a separate judgement — so two phones with the same score always get the same word.
| Score | Verdict | What we mean by it |
|---|---|---|
| 4.10 and above | STRONG BUY | The best thing at this price, and we would buy it ourselves. |
| 3.70 and above | BUY | A good phone with no serious weakness for the money. |
| 3.00 and above | CONSIDER | Ordinary for its price. Fine, but something here is a compromise. |
| Below 3.00 | SKIP | Beaten by something cheaper or barely better than something much cheaper. |
We do not test phones in a lab. Scores come from the specification sheet we assemble per phone and the live prices on Amazon and Flipkart. Camera scores read the sensors a phone has, not photographs we took with it.
Nothing here is paid for. There are no sponsored placements and no brand can buy a verdict. We earn a commission when you buy through our links to Amazon or Flipkart, which is why those links are marked as sponsored, and it does not move a score — the score is computed before anybody clicks.
A score is relative to the price. A phone at ₹12,000 and one at ₹90,000 can both score 4.1, because each is judged against what the same money buys. That is also why the price bands are the main way in.
Prices move, and the page says when. Every phone page carries the last time we read its price. We re-read prices while you are looking at the page, so the figure beside the buy button is current rather than whatever we stored overnight.
Some phones say “not rated yet”. That means our specification sheet is missing something a score depends on, and the honest answer is silence rather than a number built on a gap. Those phones still show their prices and their price history.
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