Apple iPhone Tops JDPower Customer Satisfaction Survey for the Fifth Time
Mar 18, 2011 05:58 PM EDT by 
The Apple iPhone topped JD Power’s annual ranking of smart phone customer satisfaction today. The victory marks the phone’s fifth consecutive win since the product debuted in 2007.
According to the survey, the iPhone 4 continued previous generations’ domination, earning five-star performances in categories such as ease of operation, operating system, physical design, handset features, and, of course, overall satisfaction. The only category where the iPhone 4 lost first place is battery function. In that field of play it won just two of five points.
In overall customer satisfaction, HTC and Motorola tied for second place with three stars. Nokia, Palm, BlackBerry, and Samsung each earned two stars and rounded out 3rd through 6th place respectively.
In the race for second place, HTC, maker of popular handsets like the Sprint’s EVO 4G and EVO Shift 4G and the brand new Thunderbolt for Verizon Wireless, beat out Motorola and it’s Droid family of devices thanks to consumer’s perception that HTC products offer better handset design. It’s not hard to imagine consumers’ fondness for the smooth, round edges and sleek, flat buttonless faces found on most HTC smart phones. Though it wasn’t enough to push it into 3rd place, the Taiwan-based manufacturer only notched two stars in the battery function category. That judgement echoes the verdicts of our EVO 4G and Thunderbolt reviews, the latter of which notched just two hours and 30 minutes on the LAPTOP Battery test.
Moving further down the scoring board, Nokia take’s fourth place solely on the strength of its phones’ battery stamina, for which it got a category score of five of five (in every other category Nokia scored just two of five points).
It seems Palm’s sexier Pre lineup and the allure of the innovative webOS operating system pushed still-stagnant BlackBerry out of a tie for fifth place and into last. Interestingly enough, Samsung earned the second lowest performance marks. Though Samsung tied for fifth place in Overall Quality, the manufacturer garnered just two of five points in the operating system and ease of handset categories. It also logged two points in the handset features and physical design categories despite a tendency toward vibrant AMOLED displays and a unique variety of phones.
Via JDPower.com
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March 18th, 2011 at 6:29 pm
Rubish…Consumer Reports rates it as unacceptable including the Verizon version. Reception sucks!