how to make a youtube without owning the product?

How is having an opinion dishonest? I thought everyone had one.

Here is something to think about. Maybe it's a review, maybe it's not.

But who cares?

When I was total geekhead my friends used to all call me and ask me what I thought about the latest whiz-bang printer or computer that just came on the market. They weren't looking for me to go out and buy all these printers and laptops and monitors and stuff to try it out just so I could give them my opinion.

What they really wanted was to understand all the technical gobbledegook that the manufacturers were putting on their product spec sheets. They wanted to understand why what manufacturer A was saying about Product A made it better than what manufacturer B was saying about Product B.

In other words, what they really wanted was a translator. Because even though the electronics specs were written in English, it was mostly obscure techno-babble that the masses hopefully would never learn to speak! So my friends were calling me because I spoke "Geek"!

Case in point. What does USB stand for, and how fast is the data transfer? If you know this off the top of your head, you are probably a geekhead! Because the average consumer does not know and does not care. All he or she knows is, USB 3 is faster than USB 2, which are both better than the old bulky 25-pin cable that used to come with printers at work (but that they have to pay a lot extra for if they buy a printer that uses it at home).

We all have seen such examples if we ever hung around a computer store long enough. The salesperson is busy explaining the logic and technical details of why printer A is better than printer B. And the customer's eyes are about to roll up and into the backs of their eye sockets like they are going to do a Linda Blair "Exorcist" impersonation any minute now!

Here's another case in point. Do you know what "proprietary" means?! I happened to be at a swap meet looking to buy a cell phone accessory and I (made the mistake of, ha!) used that word to describe a cell phone cable connection on a phone I had just sold that irked me. The guy behind the table was all over me!

He says "You used to work in the computer industry, didn't you?"

Me? "How'd you know?"

And he tells me, "Nobody uses that word--proprietary--unless they were a computer tech."

I laughed with him and said, "Yup, that's exactly what I did in another life!"

Anyway, my point here with all this is, if you can make your videos entertaining and clear and use language that does not alienate an electronics industry outsider (avoid industry jargon, in other words), you are going to be more than halfway home with this stuff. Because a big part of "I like this one better" is "because it has X instead of Y on it", for example "because it has 5 HDMI ports instead of just 1" Another example is, "there is an HDMI port on Laptop A and Laptop B does not have one."

And THAT you can get from the product spec sheets!

And as for those who would say "The FTC will be all over you!", consider this. Don't use the word "review". Use "comparison" or some other such word. And then have a match-off, product A compared to product B, based on the specs or features people have said they want most (you ARE finding or building surveys to learn this, right?)

But eventually you most likely WILL want to get your hands on SOME of those products. Sometimes a consumer wants to know "is it in the box, or do I have to pay extra to buy one separate?" especially in the case of a phone and having to buy the memory card or not.

Wait. That's on the product spec sheets, too.

(Or is it? Sometimes it's not. But you can always ask the phone sales rep, they know what's in the box.)

I'll even give you an interesting area to venture into. Some of the newer phones coming out from Verizon have a battery that is not removable. And that is HUGE, because it's not something the average non-iPhone-buying Verizon customer would think to even ask about. As a matter of fact, my response when I first found this out a little over a week ago was "Are you SERIOUS???" The manufacturer's point of view (so the Verizon rep says, anyway) is, the battery lasts so much longer than any of our previous phones that you won't need to buy an extra battery and swap them out in the middle of the day, no matter how much you talk on the phone, it will last. The sales rep went on to explain that the manufacturer thought most people would prefer a thinner phone to a removable battery. But for some phone buyers, this is unexpected right now.

Something else to think about. I will give my opinion right here. I would NEVER buy a Mitsubishi TV. As a matter of fact, you couldn't give me one for free and I almost venture to say you could not PAY me to take one home. And this is not as a result of owning the product. I did, however, work at the US corporate headquarters in the dealer customer service department for a short while, and based on a known flaw AND THEIR RESPONSE TO IT, I just don't trust the manufacturer. Although this was a very long time ago, I happen to know for a fact that they omitted a part that costs less than $5 on their $2,000+ big screens that were once all the rage, and they refused to repair the defect after a certain point even though they knew the part was left out. And this defect was the type that causes a TV to require replacement of ALL the picture tubes at the time, to the tune of $1,000+ in repairs over a <$5 part.

But that's just me. And I won't be putting that in any video and trying to get somebody to buy something because of it . . .