iPhone widens edge over BlackBerry in JD Power rankings
Apple's lead in smartphone customer satisfaction has only grown in the past few months, JD Power discovered in its latest Smartphone Customer Satisfaction study. The iPhone's score has remained unchanged since October …
Context & Ripple Effects
J.D. Power's latest Smartphone Customer Satisfaction study extends a pattern dating back to at least November 2008, when a MobileCrunch-reported study found iPhones twice as reliable as BlackBerries. What stands out this time is the mechanics of the lead: the iPhone's own score has held steady since October, meaning RIM is losing ground on execution, not because Apple raised the bar.
The timing sharpens the contrast. Apple enters the week with the iPad shipping Saturday after glowing reviews, first-batch App Store apps live ahead of launch, and Flurry data showing iPad developer project starts still climbing — so the satisfaction ranking lands while Apple's app-ecosystem flywheel is visibly accelerating, against a rival whose strengths remain keyboard-and-mail hardware.
First-order effects
- RIM faces a widening satisfaction gap on a third-party metric that carriers and enterprise buyers cite in handset selection, with its decline — not Apple's improvement — driving the change since October.
- Apple gets an independent validation of owner experience at the exact moment it asks developers and buyers to extend trust to a brand-new device category with the iPad launch.
Second-order effects
- Rival manufacturers are pushed to compete on software experience and ecosystem depth rather than hardware checklists, since the satisfaction gap now maps to app-platform breadth.
- Carrier merchandising decisions tilt further toward stocking and promoting the phone with the strongest satisfaction record, squeezing RIM's shelf space precisely where its enterprise franchise lives.
Third-order effects
- If satisfaction rankings keep tracking ecosystem quality rather than device hardware, they harden into a structural scoreboard where platform owners like Apple compound advantages and hardware-first vendors chase parity.
The trend: Smartphone competition is shifting from hardware reliability toward ecosystem-driven customer satisfaction, with J.D. Power-style rankings becoming the public ledger of that transition.