Inside the heads of smartphone shoppers

Everyone knows that smartphones are one of the hottest areas in technology-based products — but what exactly do people look for when they choose a smartphone? That knowledge can help businesses anticipate what employees might try to bring into the network and software developers understand what mobile platforms to target and for which types of applications.

For two years now, Google has surveyed nearly 3,000 people on their smartphone preferences and analyzed the real-world mobile device shopping lists of 2 million people who opted to have their behavior tracked. The latest survey shows that searches around researching and buying cell phones of all stripes has increased about 33 percent versus the year before.

Much of what Google’s survey has found seems obvious to me:

• Smartphones are still largely boys’ toys; men make up 58 percent of buyers, 40 percent of whom are aged 25 to 34, and largely single with no kids. (The survey results also reinforce two gender stereotypes: Men were most interested in “toy” issues such as speeds and specs, while women were most interested in “relationship” issues such as carriers’ customer support and coverage.)
• People buy smartphones mainly because they do more than regular cell phones (45 percent cited that reason).
• People who want a smartphone rather than a regular cell phone are very interested in the OS and apps capability of the device: 72 percent of smartphone buyers cared about the OS versus 42 percent for regular cell phone buyers, and 60 percent of smartphone buyers cared about available apps versus 29 percent for regular cell phone buyers. Eighty percent of smartphone buyers also were looking for a specific model, versus 50 percent of regular cell phone buyers. (Of the other factors surveyed — coverage area, customer service, cellular provider, desire to stick with an existing family plans, and desire for online account management — the two groups of buyers were essentially the same.)
• Most smartphone buyers (72 percent) stick with their current carrier, even though only 58 percent were certain they would do so at the beginning of the buying process. But 19 percent switched carriers — likely all those folks who wanted an iPhone and could get it only from AT&T.
• Of those who didn’t buy a smartphone, 53 percent cited the high cost of data plans as the reason, while 28 percent concluded they didn’t need the features. Given the high price of smartphones and of their data plans, and the two-year commitment usually required, those two responses seem like the same core response to me: They cost too much.

In Google’s findings only one thing surprised me: Sprint customers used more data than AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon Wireless customers. Kyle Keogh, a technical director at Google, theorizes that Sprint’s elimination of extra-cost data plans has encouraged more data usage. (Sprint now offers voice and data services in its standard plans, while AT&T and the others charge $30 or more per month extra for data service.)

What does this all mean? To me, it means that smartphone buyers have two main — and related — concerns.

First, they want a mobile platform that does what they know they want to do — so they’ll choose, for example, a BlackBerry if their interest is primarily messaging or an iPhone if they want to use the Web and run applications in addition to doing messaging. Thus, most users are going to commit to a specific platform and choose a model within it.

In contrast, regular cell phone users are typically focused on what’s cool at the moment. Google’s search analysis shows that, for regular cell phones, people mainly searched on specific models, typically when new models were first released, rather than on functional attributes.

Second, they stick with their current carrier. I suspect that has to do mainly with the influence of friends-and-family plans for personal devices and with the fact that companies typically impose a carrier on employees for business devices.

If your employees demand iPhones and your corporate carrier is Verizon or Sprint, you’ll end up with a lot of personal smartphones in use by your employees. But if your users prefer BlackBerrys, that’ll be less of an issue, given that most BlackBerry models (the Bold is a key exception) are available from most carriers. If you’re a developer, the smartphones offered by the major carriers — AT&T and Verizon — are likely to be most used. That means iPhone and BlackBerry mainly, with an increasing number of Android and Windows Phone 7 devices possible later in the year.

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This article, “Inside the heads of smartphone shoppers,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Gruman et al.’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile computing at InfoWorld.com.