Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is certainly in a very crowded competition for smartphone market share, no doubt about it. There are lots of quality devices for consumers that fit many price points and have many different features that are supposed to appeal to a wide swath of the smartphone market. But in the main, many consumers have many different wants, and not all of them are the same or in the same priority order when it comes to finding the right smartphone, Apple bulls included.
Some are very involved in technicals like memory, the type of display, the battery and the processor. Others just want something that is good size that the screen can be seen, the phone can be handled easily in the hard and the camera provides quality photos and an intuitive ability to share them. Some consumers have even less knowledge of what they want; some have a laundry list of criteria, and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) users are everywhere in between..
Which is why a recent ZDNet article,”(Apple) “iPhone: Passed by the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4,” is very hard to understand.
Was this a critique of ph0nes, an opinion piece or an anti Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) ad?
It’s one thing to give an opinion about preferring one phone over another, but that doesn’t usually help Joe Consumer decide or understand why one phone is better than another.
Image: Apple
Just saying that a phone has some really cool features (like the Galaxy’s AirGesture, for example) doesn’t mean the phone itself is necessarily better.
First of all, the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone 5 is six months old – which in the speed of today’s technology, is already not a fair comparison with smartphones that were just born in the last couple of weeks. Second, there is no real critique or comparison of the phones.
Opinions in critique pieces are fine, as long as you have something in terms of data or information to use – like in this comparison of cameras and this comparison of technicals.
Once information like this is presented, and a writer can make a case for why one phone is better than another based on the comparisons, then that might be a critique worth reading, and might be a helpful guide for smartphone shoppers to use in finding their device of choice.
Can an article like this be useful?
We are all more sophisticated than this author would like us to believe, and we are because a smartphone purchase is not like buying a candy bar – it’s an important purchase.
This really doesn’t help anyone determine for their own wants or needs whether Samsung, HTC or Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has the best smartphone in terms of form, function and value.
What do you think? Do you find something useful out of articles like this, or would you rather see actual critique and comparison articles in regards to smartphones, especially when it comes to competitors like Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Samsung or Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)? We’d like your thoughts in the comments section below.
DISCLOSURE: I own no positions in any stock mentioned.
