Tag Archives | Surveys

Got an iPad? Take Our Satisfaction Survey

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 2, 2010 at 11:15 pm

iPad reviews are all very well. But the iPad has been out for two months now–and at this point, the most interesting opinion about it is the collective one that’s been formed by the people who own and use it.

Which is why we’re conducting a survey on the state of iPad satisfaction. If you’ve got an iPad, please take it–and tell your friends who have one, too. Answering our questions will take only a few minutes, and we’ll use your feedback in an upcoming story. (Here, incidentally, are past articles we did reporting on our iPhone and Windows 7 surveys.)

Click here to take the survey.

[The survey is closed–thanks to everyone who participated, and stay tuned for results.]

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Envision Apple’s Tablet, Get a Shot at a $100 Apple Gift Card

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 18, 2010 at 5:44 pm

Once again, I’m going to give you guys a chance to make Apple predictions in the days before an Apple press event. (You’re no worse at it than most of the folks who get paid big bucks to do so.) This time I’d like you to take a stab at figuring out exactly what sort of tablet device Apple will announce next Wednesday, assuming it does indeed announce such a device. And if you still think Apple won’t make such an announcement–which is a pretty gutsy prediction at this point–you can make that opinion known, too.

To participate in what I’m thinking of as Technologizer’s Apple Tablet Prediction Project, click here and answer the multiple-choice questions you’ll find. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, and here’s an incentive to take part: We’ll draw one entry at random and give the person who submitted it a $100 gift card for the U.S. Apple Store.

You can fill out our T.A.T.P.P. survey through 5pm on Thursday, January 21st, at which point we’ll close it, crunch the results, and publish your aggregate guesses. If the machine you envision as a group ends up bearing much resemblance to the one Apple announces–probably!–next week, it’ll be impressive. And even if you’re way off base, this should be entertaining.

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The State of Windows 7 Satisfaction

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 30, 2009 at 12:41 am

Windows 7 is scarcely more than a month old. Most of the people who will eventually use it haven’t gotten around to trying it yet; those that have are still settling in. And the Win 7 experience will change rapidly as remaining bugs are squashed, missing drivers arrive, and compatibility glitches are ironed out. Even so, it’s not too early to start gauging what real people think of Windows Vista’s replacement.

So to riff on Ronald Reagan’s famous question from his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, Are Windows users better off today than they were a few weeks ago, back in the Vista era? We decided to ask the Technologizer community, a group of tech enthusiasts with a high propensity to acquire new operating systems quickly and push them to their limits. Starting on November 16th, we surveyed our readers (and Twitter followers) about their experiences with Windows 7. Our goal: to do a reality check on the mostly favorable initial reviews of the new OS (as well as our own survey of largely enthusiastic Windows 7 beta testers back in March).

The 550+ Windows 7 early adopters who took our survey mostly echo the positive response that the upgrade has received from professional reviewers, pundits, and users of pre-release editions. A sizable majority say they’re extremely satisfied with the OS and rate it as a clear improvement on both the beloved Windows XP and the widely-panned Windows Vista. Crippling installation problems–the bane of every upgrader’s existence, and always a legitimate reason to postpone switching OSes–were rare.

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Take Wired.com’s 3G Phone Speed Test

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 4, 2009 at 8:56 am

Wired Speed TestsWired.com, which published an eye-opening survey of iPhone 3G users’ experiences with data last August, is doing it all over again–but this time, it’s expanding its scope to test the 3G networks of all the major U.S. wireless carriers: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless. It’s a public service, and whatever the results are, they’ll be interesting. This article explains how to participate, which you do by running interactive tests on your smartphone.

I’m going to do just that on my iPhone–hope you do, too.

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Survey Indicates Corporate IT Spending Plummeting

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 20, 2008 at 11:46 am

bear marketGet ready for more bad news. Changewave surveyed executives in charge of making IT purchasing decisions, and found that a full 45 percent expected to spend less in November, an all-time high in the eight years that the firm has been conducting the survey. Only 10 percent expect to increase their spending.

What is most troubling is this: the November period has traditionally been the period when a seasonal bump up is seen in IT expenditures, research director Paul Carlton explains. And its not going to get better anytime soon.

These same execs say their 1st half 2009 budgets will likely be less than their 2nd half 2008 budgets by a substantial margin. 48 percent say it will be less, only 10 percent say more. Nearly half of those surveyed don’t expect a recovery in IT spending until the third quarter of next year.

Drilling down into specifics, the most common IT products being spent less on are PCs (20 percent), and enterprise application software (12 percent). Rounding out the top five are servers, operating system software, and application development programs.

Is there a bright spot? Yes and its in smartphones. Four in ten companies now offer them to employees, up from three in ten a little over a year ago. RIM leads with a 76 percent market share, followed by Apple with 14 percent, and RIM with 11 percent.

Apple is showing the most dramatic gains, up five percent in three months. It’s strength comes from its newfound popularity with small business, where it leads RIM in market share in companies with less than 100 employees.

Carlton points out that it is going to be tough for markets to recover as long as corporations are pulling back on spending. During a conference for analysts, he showed that the S&P 500 and NASDAQ have nearly mirrored the drops in IT spending, which also seems to reinforce the fact that our economy is becoming increasingly technology-driven.

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