Four Android phones beat iPhone 5 in US user satisfaction, but Apple still takes first place overall

Apple’s devices are notorious for dominating user satisfaction, but that supremacy is starting to slip. Android smartphones are becoming more and more popular, and most recently four of them have ranked higher in the US than the company’s iPhone 5. In fact, the latest smartphone to grab first place is the low-end $0 Motorola Atrix HD.

Mobile research firm OnDevice Research conducted a device satisfaction study by polling 320,000 mobile and tablet users in six countries, including the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, and Indonesia. Yet the most surprising results came from the US, where 93,825 mobile users were asked how satisfied they were with their device.

Here are the results:

As you can see, US mobile users reported a higher satisfaction with their Motorola Atrix HD device (8.57) than any other device. This is surprising, but could attest to a trend of smartphones becoming “good enough” for most users. Is it possible that many are now very happy with cheaper devices that get the job done, in the line of “better bang for your buck?”

OnDevice Research noted that the Android powered device comes “at a lower price point” but we wanted to make sure just what exactly we are talking about here. A quick check shows that this is your typical “$0 phone” (the ones that are advertised heavily as essentially free, with a three-year contract note in fine print).

That means it is at the equivalent price point of getting the iPhone 4, two generations behind the iPhone 5. Apple’s latest and greatest ranked in fifth (8.23), receiving a lower satisfaction rate in the US than the Motorola Droid Razr M (8.5), HTC Rezound 4G (8.32), and the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (8.26).

Despite this, Apple still held first place in the US on an aggregate level, followed closely by Google with its Nexus devices. Rounding out the top five, Motorola was third while HTC and Nokia tied for fourth. Samsung was way down in 13th place, even below BlackBerry. This further shows we’re talking about a numbers game: manufacturers that make fewer but arguably better devices rank higher than those that make a wide array of them at varying levels of quality.

The least surprising part of the survey was the 4G impact. The top five devices for satisfaction in the US are all 4G capable devices, and users with a 4G subscription reported a higher device satisfaction (7.76) than those with no 4G subscription (7.28).

You can check out the full results for the US and UK in this embedded document:

Image credit: Dora Pete