CR has always been a joke when it comes to this kind of gear.
During the great video game wars of the early ‘80s, did they pick Atari 2600? No. Mattel Intellivision? No. How about the new ColecoVision. No.
Consumer Reports gave its top rating to the Bally Astrocade, a device that was doomed to fail less than a year later.
Radio and Cell Phone engineers almost universally panned CU's testing rigs when they came out with their original report when it was learned HOW they went about their tests of the iPhone4... and it was also shown they did not test any other phones. They used the iPhone's own five bar signal strength meter as the gauge. . . and sent signals from a dumb radio source at the phone.
Add to this that on the release of the iPhone4 in the rest of the world NONE of the users in those markets can duplicate the issue... none. zero. nada. zilch. No dropped calls, no problems away from AT&T's crappy urban networks in cities where they have not been allowed to build to the demand... or in marginal areas where the AT&T service has not been upgraded to 3G yet. In the rest of the world, where the iPhone4 was released, it works fine... and the users are wondering what the American press was complaining about. Independent tests found the iPhone4 gets BETTER reception than Consumers Reports SECOND best rated phone the iPhone 3Gs... but they refuse to include the iPhone4 in their ratings because of their ignorant engineers' incompetent testing that did not account for the starting point of what was being measured and what was being attenuated... or whether the phone could still connect at those lower bar levels or not.
Apple admitted that the mathematical formula they were using to display the bars was flawed... it was the one they had been supplied BY AT&T... and had been using on the iPhone's since day the first release... and it cut off too quickly. The ONLY change that has been made is to correct that change in bars... and the cut off. The phones work.
A few selected CR atrocities:
*Dodge Omni steering scandal
*Isuzu Trooper rollover scandal
*Repeated trashing of American cars while giving Camrys and Accords CR Best Buy ratings year after year
*An issue from about 2-3 years ago that was reviewing computer hardware and referred to CRT monitors as “a space-hogging relic of the 20th century”
*Repeated trashing of any American-made product
*Faulty methods of assessing car reliability