For a while I thought the useful part of testing a phone was the moment of judgment: after an hour of play, you decide whether it was good or bad. I now think that judgment is the least useful artifact in the whole process, because it compresses an hour into a sentence and throws away every minute that made the hour what it was.
What I do instead is embarrassingly simple. A small notebook, two columns: the time, and one line about what changed. Every fifteen minutes I write one line. No scores, no adjectives if I can help it. "11:15 - back panel noticeably warm, framerate still fine." That is the whole method.
After a few weeks of this the lines start to argue with your memory. Devices I remembered as stable for an hour turn out to have been degrading from minute twenty. The component I blamed turns out to be innocent; the actual culprit is brightness at maximum, or an app waking up in the background, or the ambient temperature of my room, which I never wrote down and therefore never suspected.
The discipline also protects against a subtler failure: wanting a device to be good because you spent money on it. A number in a column is harder to argue with than a feeling.
It costs fifteen seconds at a time. That is the entire pitch. Most of the value comes from doing it badly but consistently, rather than designing a perfect schema and abandoning it in a week.
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