John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

BlackBerry Tops iPhone and Android … In a “Don’t Want” Poll

Here’s a novel way of polling consumer sentiment in the smartphone market: Don’t ask people which handset they prefer to use; ask them which one they would never use.

That’s what research house Raymond James did in a recent survey of consumer smartphone purchasing intent. And the results are interesting — if only as a reflection of the platform partisanship that’s so rife within the smartphone space.

The details: As part of its survey,* Raymond James asked respondents what features would make them more likely to buy a new iPhone or an Android or BlackBerry device: Bigger screen? Lower price? Better functionality? But it also offered them the option of saying they would never use a particular device. And plenty of respondents availed themselves of it.

Of the consumers Raymond James surveyed, 20 percent said they would never buy an iPhone, 31 percent said they’d never buy an Android phone, and 71 percent said they’d never purchase a BlackBerry.

Not a particularly surprising breakdown, given the Google-Apple duopoly currently dominating the smartphone market. Android and iPhone captured more than 90 percent of the global smartphone market in the fourth quarter according to IDC. So the sentiments reflected in this survey shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone.

Still, it’s interesting to see purchasing sentiment gauged in terms of what smartphones consumers are adamantly opposed to using. If the smartphone market is truly so factionalized that some consumers say that nothing could convince them to switch away from their preferred device, then upstart platforms like Windows Phone and the like have a steep uphill climb, indeed.

* Survey was conducted between March 14 – March 26. It polled over 250 consumers, so big grain of salt.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald