NPD Group: iPhone’s first round punch lands hardest on Treo, T-Mobile
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Oct 15, 2007 at 11:06am
According to a new report from The NPD Group, a consumer and retail information company, early buyers demonstrate that the iPhone is managing to bridge the gap between content-focused feature phones and productivity-focused smartphones.
“The iPhone’s Internet and media capabilities have resonated with consumers—especially those who previously owned Treos and Sidekicks,” says Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at NPD. “Its advanced operating system makes it competitive with smartphones for many tasks, while its sleek design and lack of expandability is reminiscent of fashion phones.”
Initial iPhone buyers were 10 times more likely than other new phone buyers to have previously owned a Treo and three times more likely to have owned a T-Mobile branded phone, such as the popular Sidekick model. Both the Treo and the Sidekick offer a physical keypad—something the iPhone, with its touch screen-based interface, does not. In contrast, iPhone buyers were no more likely than the average buyer to have previously owned a Blackberry. “The iPhone’s lack of corporate email support appears to make it less appetizing to current Blackberry owners,” Rubin said.
When it comes to carrier switching, Alltel and T-Mobile took the biggest hit from Apple and AT&T’s iPhone marketing juggernaut, per NPD’s research. Consumers who switched carriers to buy an iPhone were three times more likely to switch from Alltel or T-Mobile than from other carriers. Sprint and Verizon also lost customers to AT&T and the iPhone, but not nearly to the same degree, due to their existing over-the-air (OTA) music offerings, rich video and data services and 3G networks already in place.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
