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Anyone in the market for a new smartphone has an endless amount of online resources at their fingertips to help them make an informed buying decision. All the top tech magazines have published in-depth articles written by experts that compare each top selling smartphone in a number of categories – battery life, interface, design, screen quality, operating system, and the list goes on. While expert opinions certainly carry weight, sometimes the best way to determine the right smartphone for your needs is to read product reviews written by the actual phone users. Unfortunately, this requires sifting through a large amount of reviews in order to gain a general view of consumer sentiment.
Customer reviews are the most telling and unbiased insights into a product’s quality. Consumers who write online reviews are essentially product field testers reporting back with an honest and candid evaluation of the product. Product reviews are found all across the internet, for virtually any product or service available, from smartphones to laundry detergent to car seats. Today’s savvy consumers are not only writing reviews, but also reading them before making informed purchase decisions.
Take, for example, user reviews pulled from social media for the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Apple iPhone 5. Each smartphone has nearly 200 detailed reviews written by the phone owners—but who has time to read through all of them? Which smartphone do consumers like better—the iPhone 5, or the Samsung Galaxy S4? What are each phone’s strong points? What are the biggest issues users experience?
To find out, the PolyVista team enlisted the help of our product review analysis service, PolyVista Zoom. We collected the reviews from social media, and ran them through our advanced text analysis software to discover what customers are really saying about the two most talked-about phones on the market today. Our text mining software delved deep into the verbatim text of each review, and pulled out the most interesting and talked-about topics.
Hot Topics
The most prevalent topics varied with each phone. While the hottest topic in iPhone reviews was battery life with almost 15% of reviews mentioning the phone’s battery, 14% of Galaxy reviews contained content about the camera. What does that tell us about the phones themselves? Not a whole lot—these figures give us a clear view of the most talked about issues, but to really understand consumer sentiment, we have to dig a little deeper.
Positives and Negatives
In order to really gain insight into what consumers think of their phones, PolyVista took the verbatim text reviews and analyzed each topic for positive and negative sentiment. The results? When we compared popular topics in both review sets, Samsung beat out Apple by a wide margin in battery life and phone quality. Consumers are more satisfied with Apple’s screen, and both phones’ cameras scored very high.
If we look at that last chart, it seems that the Samsung Galaxy S4 blows the iPhone 5 out of the water. However, that may not be the case. In the charts below, we see that Apple scored extremely high in Performance, which was not even a discussion topic for Samsung, while Samsung scored very low in Applications—a topic barely discussed by Apple users.
And the Winner is…
The Samsung Galaxy S4!
Overall, both the Apple iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S4 scored well in terms of sentiment. In both review sets, consumers had more positive things to say than negative—but who came out on top? Our data shows that there were more positive reviews about the Galaxy S4 than the iPhone 5, giving the Galaxy S4 an 8% edge over the iPhone 5.
Does this prove that the Samsung Galaxy S4 is a superior smartphone over the Apple iPhone 5? The answer isn’t so black and white. Smartphone preference is subjective, and will vary from person to person. Do you want a high quality phone with better battery life? The Galaxy S4 is probably for you. Are you a power user who needs a high performance smartphone? The iPhone is more likely to better suit your needs. Just make sure you have a charger handy.
Want to know more about PolyVista’s product review analysis technology and services? To find out how our clients use PolyVista for finding actionable consumer sentiment in online product reviews, click the button below.
