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Survey says: iPhone not eating into BlackBerry market

Posted by Joe on July 15, 2008

How many people do you think switched from BlackBerry to iPhone with the launch of the iPhone 3G? If you believe the Apple fanboy hype, it would amount to a lot of people. However, it might not be as many as you think. UBS Investment Research conducted a short survey on Friday of 106 U.S. iPhone buyers. They found that just five of them, or 4.6 percent, were BlackBerry users. That number seems small in itself, but it doesn’t even tell the whole story. Three out of those five weren’t replacing their BlackBerry. Rather, they were just adding an iPhone as a personal device. So, as I always like to say in these situations, the death of the BlackBerry has been greatly exaggerated.

Of course, this is not at all a representative sample. It is not stated where these iPhone buyers were interviewed, though since it is only 106, presumably they came from one area. Also, 106 does not constitute a significant sample in most regions. And we really can’t say that three out of five BlackBerry users who buy an iPhone aren’t replacing their BlackBerry device.

So the defections seem limited, though BlackBerry had to take at least a small marketshare hit over the weekend. Even so, they have the Bold coming out soon enough, which appeals to many people over the iPhone, if for no other reason than the mechanical keyboard. Never underestimate the power of the familiar.

Then there’s the Thunder. Despite its current bugginess, it is still a promising device. Don’t listen to Apple fanboys like Dave Rosenberg, who say that the Thunder is “not even close” to being an iPhone killer. The first sign of an Apple fanboy: they offer no tangible evidence for their statements. Just a blind, cultish worship of all things Apple.

(Also, Dave: ” ‘Begging the question’ is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.” — kinda like Apple fans do.)