In the ongoing battle for mobile OS supremacy, the two major players remain Google's Android and Apple's iOS, but Microsoft Windows Phone is doing its best to crash the party. (Pardon the mixed metaphors.) Android may be winning the popularity contest— as previously mentioned, it has significantly more smartphone market share—but Apple wins when it comes to customer satisfaction and by a wide margin. However, Microsoft's Windows Phone platform is neck and neck with Apple in our survey results. Android's popularity doesn't translate directly into being as well liked, thus Microsoft and Apple share the 2012 Readers' Choice Award for smartphone platforms, or mobile OSes.
When we asked our readers how satisfied they were with their smartphones overall, Apple and Microsoft customers both rated their phones an impressive 8.7 on our 0 (extremely dissatisfied) to 10 (extremely satisfied) scale. Android, on the other hand, only received a 7.9, the same rating it received in 2011. Apple's score improved from 8.4 last year; Windows Phone, which earned an Honorable Mention in 2011, improved 0.6 points. That's up from an 8.1, which is a big jump in satisfaction.
While Apple and Microsoft rated the same for overall satisfaction, Windows Phone actually received slightly higher satisfaction ratings than iOS in several key areas, including reliability, text messaging, Web browsing, and gaming. Apple's iOS, however, rates substantially better than Windows Phone for satisfaction with the quality and availability of apps and its music player.
Android's satisfaction ratings in several drill-down areas were higher than its overall satisfaction rating. The platform received its best marks for availability of apps (8.7) though that still trailed Apple iOS's score of 9.1. Android's lowest marks came for satisfaction as a music player (7.9 compared to a 9.0 for iOS and an 8.5 for Windows Phone) and as a gaming device (7.4 compared to an 8.3 for iOS and an 8.4 for Windows Phone). Substantially more Android users also reported needing technical support with their phones (32 percent) compared to Windows Phone (20 percent) and iOS (25 percent) users.
Despite Windows Phone's success at delivering a very satisfying smartphone experience to its customers, it seems that these users aren't committed to the Microsoft platform in the same way that Android and Apple users are. When we asked how likely you were to recommend your phone to someone looking to purchase a smartphone, Apple received a rating of 9.2, which was half a point better than its overall satisfaction rating. Android's 8.2 was 0.3 points better than its overall satisfaction rating. Windows Phone's likelihood to recommend rating was only 0.1 points higher, which may indicate that users still question whether the platform can gain traction.
One platform that has no traction among PCMag readers is RIM's BlackBerry. Overall satisfaction was down to 6.8 this year, slightly below 2011's 6.9. BlackBerry's likelihood to recommend rating dropped 1.1 points from 7.2 in 2011 to 6.1. It continued to garner respectable ratings in its traditional areas of strength, specifically email (8.5) and text messaging (8.2), but these were far from the highest satisfaction ratings among all the platforms in these areas. BlackBerry had the lowest reliability score (7.5, which was tied with Microsoft) and abysmal satisfaction ratings for gaming (4.6), availability of apps (5.4), and Web browsing (5.5). These are all key areas where a smartphone platform needs to do well in order to succeed.
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