Wirefly‘s latest cell phone survey reveals that, at least when it comes to mobile phones, size matters. It turns out 64 percent of consumers surveyed are only concerned with the basics, as opposed to enhanced features like Web browsers, music players, or video streaming.
In fact, 59 percent of cell phone buyers surveyed cited size and form factor as the most important feature of a phone. That makes perfect sense to me. Otherwise you wouldn’t see so many flips, horizontal sliders, vertical sliders, slabs, and so on. The more jarring piece of data was color: 16 percent cite the color of the device as most important, which blows my mind. (Really? They don’t care if it drops calls all the time, as long as it’s red?)
Those were the two most popular single choices. About one quarter of respondents (25 percent) picked a range of other features, such as ease of use, keypad size, a large LCD screen, and affordability, as being the most important factor. Moving on to required features in general, sometimes the choices themselves are unimportant. For example, 94 percent buy a camera phone even if just 25 percent considered it a requirement. That’s probably because it’s pretty tough to avoid getting a camera these days, now that almost every handset comes with one.
One final, unsurprising turn of events: 57 percent of people over 50 claim to use their phone only for calls, while just 5 percent of people under the age of 25 say the same thing.
RadioShack has announced that it has signed an agreement with T-Mobile to sell the carrier’s phones in over 4,000 RadioShack retail outlets across the U.S. and Puerto Rico beginning later this summer.
