4 August 2026
“Source: the manufacturer” sounds like one thing. Checking thirty phones against manufacturer pages in a single day turned up four quite different things, all of which get described that way.
They are not equally useful, and the difference matters if you ever want to check a figure yourself.
Tier one: a page you can read
Samsung’s UK product pages are the best case. The full specification sits in the served HTML — battery, charging, dimensions, cameras, software support window. Open it, read it, done.
Better still, Samsung puts EU energy label data on the same page: energy class, minimum charge cycles, and the rated battery capacity as distinct from the typical one. For the Galaxy A16 5G that is 5000 mAh typical against 4860 mAh rated — two figures, both from Samsung, and only one of which appears anywhere else.
Xiaomi’s UK pages are similar. They also publish two things the industry generally omits: the GPU by name, and the storage type. Knowing the Redmi 14C uses eMMC 5.1 rather than UFS tells you more about how the phone will feel day to day than most of the numbers above it.
Tier two: a page that needs scripting
Honor’s UK specification page looks complete in a browser. Fetch it and you get the field labels — Capacity, Type, Wired Charging — with no values behind them. The figures arrive through scripting after the page loads.
This is not deception; it is ordinary modern web development. But it has a consequence. A source that only exists once code has run is a weaker source than one that exists in the document, because fewer things can read it and it is harder to preserve.
In this case Honor publishes the figures elsewhere anyway — in a footnote on the overview page, including both the typical and rated battery capacity, which is more than most manufacturers disclose. The citation on our Honor 200 Pro page originally pointed at the specification page. It now points at the page that actually shows the numbers. That correction is the whole reason this article exists.
Tier three: a page that refuses automated access
Motorola publishes a proper detailed specification, including the EU battery endurance cycle rating, on a separate support site. That site blocks automated retrieval.
A human can read it. That is a real source and a real disclosure. But it cannot be checked at scale, archived reliably, or cited in a way that a reader can verify without repeating the work by hand.
Tier four: no European page at all
vivo and Infinix both sell phones in European markets. Neither appears to publish a European specification page for the models in this database. Every figure in circulation comes from aggregators.
That case is covered separately in Some phones sold in Europe have no European spec sheet.
Why any of this matters
Specification sites present all four tiers identically. The same table, the same confident formatting, whether the number came from a page anyone can open or from a chain of copies with no origin left in it.
The date and link on each page here are meant to close that gap. But a link is only as good as what sits at the end of it, which is why the Honor citation was worth fixing rather than leaving — it pointed at a manufacturer page, which sounded right, and showed a reader nothing.
What this changes here
Nothing in the method, and one thing in the practice: source links get opened and read, not just found. A URL that contains a manufacturer’s name is not evidence. A page showing the figure is.
If a source link on this site leads somewhere that does not show the figure it is cited for, that is a bug. Report it and it will be fixed the same day.
Method: manufacturer pages read on 4 August 2026 while verifying six outstanding entries. See How we verify.