MethodologyHow MobileIQ works
Where every figure comes from, how the one number we compute is computed, and what we have decided not to publish.
Sources
Every figure on this site carries a chip naming the class of source it came from. The chip names the class; it does not grade the truth. A manufacturer's own specification is not a suspect document.
- Official
The manufacturer's published specification for its own hardware. If Apple says an iPhone weighs 199 g, that is what the iPhone weighs, and we record it as the specification rather than as a claim awaiting adjudication.
755 of 944 figures
- 3rd party
A named independent publication or database — cited on the page it appears on, with its own link and retrieval date. We use one where the manufacturer publishes nothing, not to second-guess a figure the manufacturer does publish.
189 of 944 figures
- Measured
A named lab's own bench result — someone put the device on a rig and reported what it did. It is the one class that earns the accent, because it is the one class that is genuinely different from reading a spec sheet.
0 of 944 figures — MobileIQ has no lab, so nothing here is measured by us and nothing is relabelled as if it were
Two rules hold across all three. Every figure links its source and prints the date we read it, because a source without a date is a rumour. And a figure we do not have renders as missing — named, in the space it would have occupied — never estimated, never interpolated from a sibling model, never carried over from last year's phone.
The MobileIQ index
One number, 7 attributes, weights published below. It isnot an overall score, and we will never publish one — an overall score is a ranking with no stated question behind it, which is how a phone site ends up ranking the phone it happened to like.
| Attribute | Weight |
|---|---|
| Battery per charge | 30% |
| Peak brightness | 15% |
| Battery lifespan | 15% |
| Weight | 10% |
| Refresh rate | 10% |
| Fast charging | 10% |
| Repairability (EU class) | 10% |
| Total | 100% |
- Min–max normalised across the current catalogue. For each attribute the best figure among the phones we have sourced scores 1 and the worst scores 0. So 100 means "best of the 24 phones we have sourced", not "perfect", and every score can move when a phone is added.
- A device missing more than 40% of the weighted attributes is not scored at all. It gets no number rather than a low one. A thinly sourced phone is not a bad phone, and scoring it as one would print our data gaps as its faults. Below that threshold a device is scored out of the weight it actually has. 12 of 24 phones currently carry an index.
- Repairability is scored absolutely, not against the field. The EU class is a regulatory grade — a C is a C whoever it stands next to — so it uses a fixed scale A 100 · B 75 · C 50 · D 25 · E 0 instead of being stretched across the catalogue. Min–maxing it would promote the best of a bad field to full marks.
- 10% of the weighting currently separates nothing. Refresh rate is identical on every phone we have scored, so that attribute contribute nothing to the spread between devices. The weight is published because it is the weight we intend to apply; it starts doing work when the catalogue contains a phone that differs.
- Beta The weights are a judgement, not a discovery, and they will move. When they do, every score on the site moves with them and this table changes on the same commit.
Perceptual verdicts
A comparison page does not just print two numbers; it says whether the gap between them is one you would notice. These are the thresholds it judges against.
| Attribute | Noticeable | Marginal | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weight | 30 g apart | 15 g apart | — |
| Refresh rate | 60→90 Hz, 60→120 Hz | 90→120 Hz | 60→120Hz widely perceptible; 90→120 marginal for most users. |
| Peak brightness | 400 nits apart | 150 nits apart | Outdoor-visibility studies; differences under ~150 nits at these levels are not reliably perceived. |
| Battery per charge | 6 h apart | 2 h apart | — |
| Fast charging | 25 W apart | 10 W apart | — |
- These are initial editorial estimates. They are our reading of what a person actually perceives, not the output of a study we ran. They are published here precisely so they can be argued with — a threshold nobody can see is a threshold nobody can correct.
- A difference below the marginal figure is marked as one you will not notice, and no winner is declared for that row. Between marginal and noticeable the row says so in words. A gap the table does not cover returns nothing at all rather than a guess: silence is the honest answer to a question we have not judged.
- Only the attributes above are judged. Every other row on a comparison page prints its two figures and leaves the reader to it.
What we do not do
- No reviewer-score averaging. Averaging other people's out-of-ten verdicts produces a number whose meaning is nobody's — not theirs, and not ours.
- No affiliate-ranked results. Nothing on this site is ordered by what pays. The catalogue's default order is release date, which is a fact about the phone rather than a judgement of ours.
- No prices without a date and a source. An RRP is a figure retrieved from one shop on one day; printed bare it becomes a promise we are not tracking and cannot keep.
- No carrier compatibility matrix. Retired on 19 August 2026: every current mainstream phone works on every UK network, so a twenty-cell grid per device answered a question nobody was asking — the compatibility question is real only for imports, refurbs and grey-market budget devices, and that is an answer page rather than a table.
- No third-party score as a sortable column. A figure like a DXOMark rating may be cited on a device page, attributed and dated, the same as any other third-party source. It will not become a column you can rank the catalogue by: a systematic extraction of someone else's scores into our own sortable table is the substantial part of their database, and database right protects exactly that.