Inside TechLife

GET THE LOWDOWN ON TECHLIFE’S EDITORIAL POLICIES, TEST PRACTICES, HOW TO READ THE BENCHMARK RESULTS AND MORE.

TECHLIFE IS AUSTRALIA’S most practical mainstream technology magazine, having been in print since 2012, when we launched as a redesigned and modernised version of Australian PC User. The latter was first printed in 1990, and we take that 25-year heritage seriously and strive to be both ethical and transparent in our coverage of technology and any other topics we broach.

Like our sister magazine, APC, we have two main goals here at TechLife: to track down the best of modern tech and to help our readers get the most from it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms. We know most people aren’t wed to a single brand’s products and use a variety of devices in their lives. And like you, TechLife’s journalists want to know what’s good in tech — no matter what platform it resides on.

UNBIASED REVIEWS

Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelentingly positive, however, and our other aim at TechLife is to be as objective as possible in our coverage. That means identifying the best products from multiple perspectives — the best performance, best value and best features and, ideally, the products that offer the best mix of these three aspects.

As a matter of policy, reviews published in TechLife are not shared with product-providers prior to print. We will contact vendors under certain conditions; if we have a problem testing a product that seems to indicate it may be faulty, or to invite a vendor to clarify how a particular feature works. If a TechLife reviewer has any potential conflicts of interest involving a brand, the review will always be assigned to another writer.

LABS TESTING

We like to review products as though we’d bought them from the shops ourselves. In order to make our reviews and other stories as unbiased as possible, TechLife strives to conduct rigorous, objective and scientific tests and benchmarks where possible. We use a variety of tools and programs to achieve this, including many freely available benchmark suites for assessing things like general system performance, gaming, media encoding and battery life.

In most cases, for the benchmark results published in TechLife, you can assume that higher is better. There are certain tests that deviate from this rule and where the opposite is true; in those cases, we’ve flagged the results with a note explaining as such.