2011 – Customers view of Smart Phones

This analysis is based on 82,620 customer reviews of 318 smart phones published online by December 15th 2011.

To insure statistical representation and accuracy of results, we have focused on 42 smart phones that were reviewed at least 100 times this year. That may mean that some phones that were introduced toward the end of the year did not qualify for this report.

We have studied before the correlation between number of reviews published online and a number of units shipped, and therefore found it important to use it for comparison.

The most customer-reviewed phones of 2011 are HTC Thunderbolt (5,579), Apple iPhone 4-16GB (4,106) and LG Ally (2,514).

HTC got a hold on the position of the most reviewed brand in the smart phones category largely based on popularity of the Thunderbolt.

The customer’s enthusiasm for Android smart phones and the availability of a large number of models from multiple brands produced very unbalanced distribution of  reviews (75%).  

However, the Android OS enthusiasm did not translate into customer satisfaction lead as Windows phone customers’ expectations were exceeded by their experience with a wider margin. One of the possible reasons is the relatively weaker support of Android by the developer’s community that translates into the availability of applications.

It appears that Nokia’s decision to migrate their phones to Window OS is a wise one considering Symbian satisfaction scores.

Our Market Intelligence Analysis of the smart phone segment indicates that the following Attributes of customer experience are most important to them:

1. Reliability – 14.76% of all opinions expressed
2. Usability – 7.23% of all opinions expressed
3. Battery Life – 6.42% of all opinions expressed
4. Display – 5.82% of all opinions expressed
5. Camera & Video – 4.91% of all opinions expressed
6. Reception/Call Quality – 2.57% of all opinions expressed
7. Customer Support – 2.27% of all opinions expressed
8. Keyboard – 2.27% of all opinions expressed
9. Design (style) – 1.57% of all opinions expressed
10. Price – 1.23% of all opinions expressed
11. Music Player – 1.00% of all opinions expressed

In terms of overall satisfaction, Blackberry Style 9670 has earned the top customer satisfaction rating (1.60) and HTC Rhyme (1.59) came within a statistical tie, while Motorola Citrus (0.72) and Droid 2 Global (0.82) are on the very bottom of the list.

To get more specific insights into the dynamics of the smart phone customer perceptions, we sampled a market segment by analyzing the most experienced (i.e., most reviewed) models representing different operating systems. We picked the models that are close to each other in a number of customer reports to make it more comparable.

1. Apple iPhone 4S – 542 customers
2. Blackberry Torch 9800 – 550 customers
3. HTC Trophy – 236 customers
4. Nokia N8 – 523 customers
5. Samsung Continuum Galaxy S – 444 customers

More details and customer feedback verbatim are available via access to the dynamic dashboard for this segment on request.