Smart Phone Owners Report More Problems with Call Quality, Spam, Internet Quality

As useful and valuable as consumers find smart phones, based on their buying of the devices and services, smart phones do seem to produce higher rates of call quality issues, unwanted text messages and, obviously, Internet access experience, a study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project suggests. 


The findings point out an apparent contradiction: though people find relatively high instances of product failure when using either feature phones or smart phones, the value so vastly outweighs the advantages and even the defects do not deter high rates of product acceptance. 


Some of us would note that, for decades, cable TV providers faced the same issues, and in some ways still do. Consumers frequently rank their "satisfaction" relatively low, compared to other products. But that has not historically lead to product abandonment. 


In recent years there has been significant loss of market share to other providers, but even the other providers receive substantially the same complaints as do cable TV providers. 


Some would argue that subscription products generally are less favored than other goods. Whether that is because such products often are intangible, or disliked for some other reason, is hard to determine. 


But it is somewhat striking that so many consumers of mobile service experience the reported problems. Some 88 percent of all American adults have mobile phones and 72 percent of respondents experience dropped calls at least occasionally. 


Some 32 percent of mobile device owners say they encounter this problem at least a few times a week or more frequently than that. About 68 percent of cell owners receive unwanted sales or marketing calls at one time or another. 


And 25 percent of mobile phone owners encounter this problem at least a few times a week or more frequently, the study suggests. 


Of users with mobile broadband service, 77 percent of respondents said they experience slow download speeds that prevent things from loading as quickly as they would like. Of those mobile Internet users, 46 percent report slow download speeds weekly or more frequently.




Smart phone owners reported higher incidence levels of these problems, compared with feature phone owners.