People are switching mobile platforms to get in on some of the new iPhone 4S goodness according to an informal poll by Reuters – but how far is their conclusion accurate? The iPhone 4S is the latest mobile wonderphone, with people excited about upgrading across the globe – but is it enough to make the often difficult switch?
The tech blogs may have reported the iPhone 4S release with a collective “meh”, except for the fun you can have with its new mobile assistant Siri – but consumers often see things differently. The iPhone 4S is without doubt the best iPhone on the market – and if you are in the market for an iPhone, it is definitely worth the extra money over the iPhone 4. That said, it is not notably better than the Samsung Galaxy SII, or HTC Sensation XL in spec terms (in fact it falls behind them on certain fronts) – so why would those who have got used to Android and built up Android app collections make the switch? The simple answer is they’re not.
Reuters polled 127 people in total (a pretty tiny sample size), and of those 127 – 28 of them where moving to an iPhone from what Reuters refers to as “rival phones”. How much Nokia phones on the market at the moment are rivals in any way is debatable – with most Nokia users having dumbphones or featurephones – hardly smartphone rivals for the iPhone at all. Similarly with BlackBerry‘s – they don’t really compete with the iPhone at all – they are phones used primarily for business (or waiting days for emails to arrive), whereas the iPhone, Android phones, and WP7 phones cater to the more general population of consumers.
That Apple is still stealing market-share away from Nokia, who are still to release their first WP7 phone to start exciting users again, and BlackBerry, who have been sliding for the past couple of years, is not surprising. Android is doing exactly the same, and WP7 will soon follow with its marketing push over the coming months with Nokia and Samsung. People aren’t switching from rival platforms, they are still switching from the dying platforms of old-Nokia and BlackBerry.
There were no quotes in the Reuters article from Android or WP7 users making the switch – probably because very few from their real rivals are actually doing so.