iPhone Wins 'Most Satisfying' AwardiPhone Wins 'Most Satisfying' Award

Love it or hate it, the iPhone appears to make most users happy. How do we know this? J.D. Power and Associates named the iPhone winner of its 2010 smartphone customer satisfaction survey.Customer satisfaction can be a wishy-washy thing. Lots of factors are involved, especially where mobile phones are concerned. J.D. Power polled some 13,590 traditional mobile phone and 4,480 smartphone owners about their devices to see what they think.

The methodology included a breakdown on what makes the phones work or not work, and how satisfied the users are with specific features and functions. The criteria for traditional wireless handsets (think flip phones) are operation (30%); physical design (30%); features (20%); and battery function (20%). For smartphones, citeria are ease of operation (26%); operating system (24%); physical design (23%); features (19%); and battery function (8%). The results?

What's interesting is that devices with touch screens, in general, outranked non-touch devices by 40 points in J.D. Power's survey. Unfortunately the survey doesn't say why. Personally, after using touch-based devices for nearly three years, I find phones with buttons to be physically painful to use. It's so much easier to just touch the screen (touching what you want to do) than to click a d-pad five times to move a cursor around.

Apple's iPhone won all the categories (ease-of-use, OS, design, and features) except one: battery life. Users appear to be dissatisfied with the iPhone's battery life. I don't blame the pollees on that one. The iPhone's battery life could definitely be better.

[Via J.D. Power]