In Business, BlackBerry Users Happiest

BlackBerry devices manufactured by Research in Motion rank highest in overall customer satisfaction among business wireless smartphone users, according to J.D. Power and Associates.

RIM ranks highest in overall smartphone customer satisfaction with a score of 702 points on a 1,000-point scale, performing particularly well in the operating system factor, which includes the speed of moving between applications and speed of sending/receiving e-mails. RIM also performs particularly well in battery aspects, including the length of battery life. Treo manufacturer Palm (698) and Samsung (698) tie to closely follow RIM in the ranking.

Highly satisfied owners are more than 50 percent more likely to repurchase the same brand than those who are not satisfied with their smartphone, J.D. Power says.

iPhone Dings Treo and Sidekick

iPhone buyers were 10 times more likely than other new phone buyers to have previously owned a Treo and three times more likely to have owned a T-Mobile branded phone, such as the popular Sidekick model, say researchers at NPD Group.

In contrast, iPhone buyers were no more likely than the average buyer to have previously owned a Blackberry. NPD theorizes that lack of support for corporate BlackBerry servers is the reason.

Alltel and T-Mobile took the biggest churn hit. Consumers who switched carriers to buy an iPhone were three times more likely to switch from Alltel or T-Mobile than from other carriers.

Sprint and Verizon also lost customers to at&t, but not nearly to the same degree.

If early buyer trends hold up, the iPhone might be bridging the gap between content-focused feature phones and productivity-focused smart phones, NPD argues.

Personally, I still think it will be tough to develop a single device that is equally adept at melding feature and productivity device functions. Well-designed user interfaces will help, but the fact remains that such devices must embrace too much complexity and consume too much power. That means the devices will be harder to use.

Mobile phones still are consumer devices. And in the consumer device space it is a truism that a single-purpose device will outperform a multi-purpose device. Unfortunately, lots of us will continue to use two devices as a result.