If there’s one thing I learned in my college statistics class, it’s that you can’t keep a good analyst down. So a headline that reads “90 Percent of Handset Owners Rate Apple iPhone Experience Superior” should not provoke cartoon-style dropped jaws and bulging eyes, but rather a weary shrug and cynical “of course it does.”
Strategic Analytics polled cell phone users (we have no idea exactly how many) on how they would rate experiences of particular tasks on their own phone as opposed to on the iPhone. Never mind that it’s utterly impossible that these people could have ever touched an iPhone, much less used one for any significant amount of time. Reality does not stop a determined analyst.
The Reality Distortion Field is apparently going strong, as the iPhone handily trumped users own phones in every category save one, Texting, where it lost by a small margin.
So what was the test really based on? According to the firm, “Strategy Analytics captured consumer responses to video presentations of iPhone features developed by Apple using its panel of advanced mobile device buyers.” In English that’s: “we showed a bunch of geeks Apple’s website and Jobs’s Macworld keynote, and then mopped up the drool.”
Despite the high marks, this really proves nothing beyond the fact that people’s expectations are pretty darn high. I’m starting to worry that the bar may be set too high even for Apple, with the only possible recourse being for Steve Jobs to personally hand deliver each iPhone.
[via MacSurfer]
I don't think expectations are too high from a user's point of view. I think what was showed will work as showed. The problem is price. The problem also is the slow speed of edge. I use edge on a treo, but that is a mobile browser with all graphics turned off--that kind of defeats the use of safari.
But for those of us who have hated our phones all our lives--it's ease of use is the killer feature, and I'll pay for it.
Actually, I think the respondents were just being honest. "So... do you think the iPhone experience would be better than your experience with your current phone?" "Crawling naked over shards of broken glass while being catheterized by a near-sighted chimpanzee would be better than my experience with my current phone. So, sure, I'll go with 'yes'."