2010-04-07 06:43:20
Mon Apr 5, 2:38 pm ET
Now more than ever, Americans are falling all over themselves to continue their collective love affair with the Apple iPhone.
In J.D. Power's most recent quarterly survey of smartphone owners' satisfaction levels with their handsets, the iPhone again has come out far and away at the top of the heap. In every metric but one, owners give the iPhone the highest marks: 5 stars out of 5 in the J.D. Power "Power Circle Ratings."
Apple owners gave their iPhones top marks for ease of operation, operating system, physical design, handset features, and an overall satisfaction rating.
The iPhone, however, earned a mere 2 out of 5 rating for its puny battery life. (I feel your pain on that one, folks.)
In comparison, the other smartphone makers rated earned dismal scores. The BlackBerry line got a 3 out of 5 overall satisfaction rating, enough to put it in a solid second place in the survey. All the other brands analyzed Palm, HTC, Nokia, and Samsung scored a pathetic 2 out of 5 stars for overall satisfaction.
The good news: Owners of other brands of phones aren't completely turned off by their devices. The BlackBerry earned a 5 out of 5 rating for its battery life, and both Nokia and Samsung scored 4 out of 5 in that category.
But other than those highlights, the numbers are pretty grim. In fact, while the iPhone's overall satisfaction rating remained unchanged since the last survey, every other manufacturer's rating has been on the decline.
What do users polled in this survey like the most about their phones? The touchscreen. Failure to include a touchscreen on a smartphone was responsible for a healthy smackdown in a phone's average rating, and consumers now say that they even prefer traditional ("dumb") phones with touchscreens by a wide margin over those with nothing but keypads.
Christopher Null is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.