Dubious User Satisfaction Survey Attacks Apple

More than 320,000 smartphone users participated in a user satisfaction survey conducted by OnDevice Research. Curiously, the iPhone 5 came in fifth and last, scoring 8.23 out of 10. The oddest part, though, is that the Motorola Atrix HD came in first, with an 8.57. In the middle were the Motorola Droid Razr M (8.5), the HTC Rezound 4G (8.32), and the Samsung Galaxy Note II (8.26).

Well, this is officially the most ludicrous survey ever. First of all, when the highest and lowest scores come within less than a point of each other, is there really a statistically important difference?

Second of all, were the users all experienced with the other phones? For all we know, the phones— especially the iPhone—were overrated because the owners didn't know any better but just loved what they had. I mean, who buys a Motorola phone? Obviously, it would be a newbie to the smartphone scene and thus they'd be overwhelmed by the benefits of a smartphone and rate the Motorola very high.

Let's face it, Motorola is not blowing the lid off the market with massive sales—although this bogus survey could be used to leverage sales. This will never happen, though, since Google has no clue when it comes to actual sales and marketing. I take this all back, of course, if Google financed this survey.

Anyway, the survey was clearly conducted to put Apple in a bad light. In fact, very few serious iPhone users would ever buy anything else. If the iPhone got any low marks, they were from the casual user who has had trouble with the device.

My son, for example, hates the iPhone because the Home button on his iPhone 4 does not work anymore and neither Verizon nor Apple will do anything to fix the problem, rendering the phone useless for anything other than phone calls. He's looked into it and apparently the issues with this one moving part are widespread. Give him a customer survey and you can be certain he will low-ball the results out of sheer hatred.

Most Android phone manufacturers, especially Motorola and HTC, did away with any notion that there should be a major point of failure such as Apple's Home button; the entire phone has to fail at the touch screen level for the phone to be unusable. (Note: I have never seen a Motorola smartphone in the wild, ever.)

I actually believe that the Apple ranking is artificially pumped up by the mavens who I'm certain rated the phone as perfect or near-perfect. These fanboys counter the overly negative input from the folks with dead Home buttons.

I advised my son to crack his screen and then go into an Apple Store carrying the phone with a bloody and bandaged hand, implying that the shards are cutting him on a daily basis. The phone would be a liability issue for Apple. I only suggested this because I know someone who was actually cut to shreds by the broken glass and did so.

Apple has owned the smartphone market for the past six years and it is becoming the Model T Ford of the industry. Henry Ford kept the Model T on the market as long as he could, until his executives forced him to do something new. The competition has since caught up and zoomed past Ford. We can probably expect an iPhone 5S refresh of the product soon, but after that, I think something radically new is due. That will get everyone excited again.

But first, fix that Home button problem!