A recently conducted survey came up with an intriguing result – Blackberry is the least preferred brand among smartphone purchasers. When top preferences are considered across all surveys, this one differed from the rest with a psychological twist. The fact that customers generally have aversions to certain products was noted by Raymond James’ research arm that decided to question people about the cell phones that attracted them the least, with interesting results. Blackberry led with 71.4 percent of people saying they would never buy its devices; Android followed with a comparatively low 31.3 percent. 19.7 percent of those surveyed named the iPhone.
The survey conducted among 250 people had questions like which features were most likely to make users buy a new smartphone with answer choices including low prices and big displays. The number of respondents may be small and insufficient to generalize, but the results seem to concur with current market trends, at least with respect to Blackberry. While Android enjoys a 51.7 percent share in the U.S. market, iOS comes second with 38.9 percent. Blackberry on the other hand makes up only 5.4 percent of the total market. It does not even feature in the top five smartphone manufacturers, where the fifth position is held by LG with 6.8 percent market share.
Android being open source is present on a wide range of smartphones, both high level and entry level handsets. Hence, the favouritism or hatred for the OS tends to vary greatly with user demographics and thus its second lowest preference as per the survey is not be consequential. iPhones and iOS are the exclusive properties of Apple and enjoy a large fan base especially for their great design and ease of use, which are usually the most desired features by non technical users.
Blackberry has always had an image of being a corporate phone, specifically designed for office use. The company is trying hard to get over the image by appealing to the general public with its latest offerings. The recently released Z10 comes with a complete touch interface without a physical keyboard – a first for Blackberry (unless you consider the failed Storm series). While the company tries its level best for revival, there seems to be no end to the negative publicity with rumours ranging from high return rates to terrible sales.
April 20, 2013 at 9:19 am
The negative rumors have turned out to be false in many cases but there is lots of good news with fact that this new blackberry has been bringing to the headlines. Canadian Tire just announced that the new BlackBerrys would be their exclusive corporate phones, user reviews are extremely high and industry experts give credit to how intuitive the new OS is. There is no doubt that Blackberry has a perception issue in the US that they are working to address but to keep repeating a survey of only 250 people is amateurish at best.