A couple of weeks ago, we published the results of a survey of Technologizer readers–both iPhone 4 owners and prospective iPhone 4 owners–about the “Antennagate” controversy. While the happy campers outnumbered the disgruntled consumers, it did show a meaningful minority as dissatisfied, some to the point where they said they intended to return the phone.

I said that we weren’t attempting to collect data that was projectable to reflect the experiences and opinions of all iPhone 4 owners. Nevertheless, a bunch of irate commenters griped about the survey because…it wasn’t projectable to reflect the experiences and opinions of all iPhone owners. They explained to me why our methodology was meaningless. (As my friend and former colleague Ed Albro noted, you never know how many statistics experts read your publication until you publish a study whose conclusions they dislike.)

Okay. ChangeWave, an outfit that does nothing but consumer research, has conducted an iPhone 4 satisfaction survey of its own. The company doesn’t detail how it found iPhone 4 owners to survey, or the demographic breakdown of respondents. (It does say that it surveyed 213 people–I surveyed 500, and several people who didn’t like our conclusions informed me that anyone who knows anything about surveys knows that was so small a sample as to be meaningless.)

The scope of ChangeWave’s study is radically different from Technologizer’s little survey–it asked a comprehensive set of questions relating to satisfaction (similar to our iPad survey), while we focused in on the antenna dustup. And ChangeWave surveyed only owners, while we also collected data from other interested parties.

Overall, ChangeWave found high levels of satisfaction with the iPhone 4, but the company thinks the antenna controversy had an impact:

• Ninety-three percent of respondents said they were very or somewhat satisfied with their iPhones. (Impressive–but down from the 99 percent of iPhone 3GS owners who said the same thing in a 2009 ChangeWave survey.)
• Twenty-four percent said that excessive dropped calls was the thing they disliked most about the iPhone 4…but respondents reported fewer dropped calls than iPhone 3GS owners did in the earlier survey.
• Seventy-three percent of respondents said that they were very or somewhat satisfied with Apple’s response to the antenna issue; 18 percent said they were very or somewhat dissatisfied.

I hope to conduct an iPhone 4 satisfaction study of our own–one which surveys more folks than ChangeWave did. I still won’t attempt to figure out what the teeming masses of iPhone 4 owners think; to me, it’s just as interesting to learn what’s on the mind of atypically serious gadget aficionados like Technologizer readers.

And I think I’ll wait a bit before I field a survey. Antennagate seems to have (mostly) died down, and at this point the most interesting new data would reflect perceptions that owners form based entirely on their own extended hands-on usage.

And just to be completely unscientific: If you’re reading this and own an iPhone 4, just how happy or unhappy are you so far?

 
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