PCMag’s Readers’ Choice Awards: Windows Phone
       Author: Admin Posted on: 28.03.2012 at 12:00 PST

In the ongoing battle for mobile OS supremacy Android may be winning the popularity contest right now but Microsoft and Apple wins when it comes to customer satisfaction and by a wide margin.

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 PC Magazine asked their readers how satisfied they were with their smartphones overall, Microsoft and Apple customers both rated their phones an impressive 8.7 on their 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.

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 Microsoft and Apple 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.

Substantially more Android users also reported needing technical support with their phones (32 percent) compared to iOS (25 percent) and Windows Phone (20 percent) users.

Last year’s top performers on AT&T—Samsung’s Windows Phone-based smartphones and Apple’s iPhone—once again win PC Magazine Readers’ Choice Award.

Samsung received a very impressive overall satisfaction rating of 9.0, up from 8.7 in 2011.

The Samsung phones once again receive the highest overall reliability scores (9.1), and they also rated best in several other areas, including call coverage (lest we forget that our smartphones can be used for actual phone calls, too).

The iPhone doesn’t stand out as a phone on AT&T’s network. In fact, it had the lowest rating for coverage outside the home area.

Verizon Wireless received responses for the widest selection of smartphones in this year’s survey, including phones from four different Android phone manufacturers.

That said, the Android phones didn’t do well enough to earn a Readers’ Choice Award.

HTC shares the award with Apple. The companies received very similar satisfaction ratings in many areas, including overall satisfaction where both were rated 8.8.

Windows Phone-based HTC phones—represented by a single handset, the HTC Trophy—excelled in satisfaction with email (9.2).

PC Magazine also asked their readers why they chose the mobile phone that they did and their answers showed that platform choice is clearly driven by very different psychologies but again the Windows Phone OS is cited as the number one reason to pick that platform by a huge margin (78 percent).

Source: PCMag