Engadget deleted the "EVO 4G vs iPhone 4" poll as soon as EVO started winning

From memory (sorry no source) I believe it is related to the amount of emotional tension the individual experiences, and the release felt, in making the purchase. It is not the amount of money involved. So taking two people with the same income and net worth, if one person gets very emotionally committed and spends a lot of time socializing and projecting how great product X is going to be and feeling bad because he doesn't have it yet, and the other person just buys it on a lark? The first person will tend to be very dogmatic, perhaps religious or irrational, about the value of the product. This effect is culmulative.

By the way, this "release" that is felt after the immediate purchase has a tremendous cognitive blinding ability. The purchaser is something like 100 times more willing to buy some related product in the immediate minutes after the big decision is made while the "glow" is still there. LOTS of folks make BIG money exploiting this.

By the way, the tendency among intelligent people is to view a lot of this as "psycho-babble" or some such. So they spend a lot of time online, doing research, reading various opinions, making an informed choice -- all the while falling into the trap outlined above. Except they don't see it.

Humans are really cool to observe. They are the only creatures that can act completely emotionally and then beat the heck out of you using logic and facts when you point out what's going on. That's neat

I think what happened here is the poll was posted before being approved by someone slightly higher up the totem pole at Engadget and was retracted by said person so that a more full treatment could be done later.

People make mistakes, this doesn't really bother me too much, especially since they have apologized and promised a more in-depth re-post in the future.

What does bother me is how crazy people are getting about this. I understand being a fan of something, but there's such a thing as taking it too far. Yeesh.

Please don't use the word "journalism" and Engadget in the same post. Ever again.

Is it great work? No. Is it possible given the speed of the gadget news cycle? Yes.

And I read that article before it was taken down, it was total fluff. It shouldn't ever have been posted. They should have taken it down and left the editor's explanation in place.

But seriously, Android-fan readers need to calm the fuck down. This inconsequential editing gaffe doesn't mean Engadget hates anyone's phone, nor love anyone else's phone, or have any special conspiracy-driven agenda to hide bad press for Apple. It reveals the profound insecurity of that forum's collective mentality when they say things like that and get a lot of people agreeing.

I know the EVO has been getting socked in the press for its battery life (and these complaints are legitimate), but really it's a cool phone with a lot to offer and all signs point to the launch going very well for a Sprint phone. Re-lax.

They posted the poll to get page views. The integrity on Engadget is severely lacking, in my experience.

Seems reasonable.

In reality, you can't make a good comparison between a phone that was just launched and one that hasn't been. You end-up comparing press-releases, something the tech press was never afraid to do.

Maybe so, but as your parent post says who genuinely cares? That article and poll outcome are not going to be some holy grail that changes any consumer's mind about what to buy, the bias of the employee in the shop that 90% of people who want a phone go to for advice are far more effective.

The other 10% are the ones reading a tech journal online and already have a fixed opinion on what they would get, so the playground analogy of "I want my favourite to win" is very well fitting to this situation.

Let's also not kid ourselves that there was some genuine gold or masterpiece of literature in the comments either (more likely some variant on the laughably naive "when will the world wake up and realise that they DON'T WANT A CLOSED PHONE OS"); the entire world would be better off if stuff like this wasn't even given the oxygen of publicity.

According to TIME magazine, the point of online polls is Moot.

Even if a given online poll is never actually fixed in practice, they're still seriously bad quantitative measurement if they use a self-selected sample of people.

You're not even able to say that n% of Engadget readers felt some way, because the population of people who happen to show up while the survey is open is still not randomly selected within that demographic: what day of the week did you post it? Did someone with an axe to grind promote the blog post for you on another site, on facebook, or some IRC channel...on Colbert?

Respondents have to be randomly selected, and this is widely known. But since polls generate traffic and engage the readership everybody looks the other way. Even on esteemed sites like HN where everybody should know better - although I have faith that it's not done here for the purpose of generating traffic.

I'm an old fart, and "journalism" is an accolade that I would never bestow upon a techno-lust blog. Still, this event is dubious.

But it's not like the poll was actual quantitative measurement, so the world didn't lose anything of value beyond whatever dubious value it had to fanbois and rabid detractors alike.

of course they responded somehow, that's the next best thing after not silently removing once published poll. we can hope their intentions are clear, but we know nearly for sure the poll was there, some voting happened and then it was removed (the 'nearly' being the possibility of the story all made up by androidforums.)

You should reset it to 0 for such shoddy writing. For example, here is the text on the camera section:

  The EVO has higher resolution cameras front and back (8 megapixel / 1.3
  megapixel, vs. 5 megapixel / VGA). Apple claims its low resolution sensor
  around back is to improve the low light performance, and both manufacturers
  are using the same "backside illuminated" tech. We'll have to let these duke
  it out in the wild (we've only seen professionally-produced samples from
  Apple's camera), but the EVO wins the spec war.

Looks like speculative nonsense to me. Anyone who knows anything about digital cameras knows that published megapixel spec wars are almost never valuable (for example, my D700 is out-megapixeled by even some high-end point-and-shoots! But I can tell you which camera can capture the scene more faithfully in any condition, every time). Until the iPhone 4 is in hand and people can evaluate its camera, there is no way to know if the iPhone has a better, worse, or equivalent camera. All we have right now from Apple are slick marketing materials produced by professional photographers, many of which probably had assistants using reflectors or lights to help smooth out the dynamic range.

This was an article that shouldn't ever have been published, and clearly was basically a hype piece that slipped through editing during the press blitzkrieg of WWDC.