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How Accurate is Digitimes?

Digitimes is the source of many, many rumors about tech products, but have you ever wondered just how accurate they are?

I got to pondering that question this morning, and after looking through the posts I’ve written about Digitimes it turns out that Digitimes is right less often than a magic 8 ball and nowhere near as good as a chimpanzee throwing darts to make stock choices.

In the time that I’ve been writing about Digitimes, I’ve mentioned them no less than 80 times, not all of which are rumors. I’ve also passed over a number of rumors, like the one which claimed the Google Tablet would hit the market in May. So for the sake of this post I’m going to take the most recent dozen rumors and see how accurate they are. But I’m going to leave out the ones which I cannot prove as well as the ones which haven’t happened yet

BTW, Harry McCracken wrote a similar post a couple weeks ago over at Technoligizer. That’s where I got the idea for this post.

Amazon can’t release a Kindle with a color E-ink screen because the only one under production is 9.7″.

Intel’s tablet turned out to be 7″, not the 10″ that Digitimes predicted.

See above.

  • Apple Not Releasing iPads in January? True

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

  • Apple to Release 2 iPads in JanuaryWrong Date

The iPads weren’t announced until March.

Digitmes reported that so-called industry insiders doubted the success of the Kindle Fire (before it shipped). Needless to say, they were wrong.

Amazon actually shipped 4 or so million Kindle Fires last year.

The second Nook Color looks just like the first and is produced by Inventec.

It wasn’t launched until November.

  • Kindle news: latest Amazon tablet rumors – by August or September  (TeleRead) Fiction

Kindle Fire didn’t launch until late October.

This Digitimes story contained a bunch of rumors about screen size, CPU, manufacturer. Some details were correct.

They got the date, price, and other details wrong but some were correct.

  • Rumor: Apple to release 7″ iPad Fiction

Yeah, like that ever happened.

Of the 13 times I’ve covered a Digitimes rumor in the past 18 months, they got the story right exactly once. On 4 other occasions they got some details right, but they also got some wrong. But on Eight out of the 13 predictions, Digitimes got it wrong.

Eight.

And this is the source that so many tech blogs watch and repost. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

 

 

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Comments


Jake Paris May 25, 2012 um 4:10 pm

"But on Eight out of the 18 predictions"… Did you mean 13 predictions?


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