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Publicly traded until it was taken private last year, Alltel was the subject of our most recent survey. We polled Alltel stores across the country and found that LG phones are the bestsellers. Thirty-seven percent of respondents named as bestsellers LG models including the AX8600, AX 145, Rumor and Scoop. Motorola was the next most frequently named manufacturer, with 30% of those surveyed calling it their best seller. The most frequently named model was the RAZR. The top email device for Alltel stores was the Blackberry Pearl, named by 26% of respondents. Other Blackberry models brought that manufacturer’s total to 67% - making it by far the bestselling brand. Motorola won the prize for bestselling music device, with 44% of respondents naming various Motorola models. Twenty-two percent of those surveyed named the MOTOROKRtm Z6m, and 15% named the MOTORAZR2 V9m.

In our survey over the first two weeks of February of broad line electronics retailers we found that the Apple iPod continues to lead the market for MP3 players. The Apple iPod was seen as the “best” MP3 player by 75% of our respondents (up from 71% in our December survey) while Microsoft Zune player was seen as “best” by the remaining 25% (up from 11% in our December survey). Interestingly Creative Zen, Sandisk and other vendors were shut out in this category. We asked about the cheapest MP3 players in the market as well in our survey and found the Best Buy brand Insignia player cited as the “cheapest” by 25% of our respondents (note that roughly 50% of our survey responses were from Best Buy stores) and 21% cited the Sandisk Sansa line of MP3 players. Brands such as Nextar, Creative, Isonic and iLo were also mentioned as being the “cheapest”. We also asked respondents to tell us if they viewed a stand alone MP3 player or a combination music phone to be the better device. 50% of respondents stated that a music phone is the better device while 39% said that a stand alone MP3 player was better. This is a shift from our December survey where more respondents preferred the MP3 players to a music phone by a margin of 49% to 42%. Storage capacity and sound quality were the primary elements cited by MP3 player supporters while convenience and the 2:1 benefits of the music phone were mentioned by those preferring the music phones.

We have concluded a recent survey on the best selling cell phones as defined across three categories. We asked 100 cell phone store sales representatives what the “best” phone was, the best smartphone/PDA device and what the best phone for music was.

The results of our survey were not entirely surprising but did highlight some interesting trends. The “best” phone outside of AT&T stores (AT&T results discussed in detail below) the best selling phone remained the Motorola RAZR (all variants) followed closely by Nokia’s N-Series line with the N-95 and N-73 primarily cited.  Motorola RAZR’s were seen as the best phone by 17% of our survey respondents while the Nokia N-series was favored by 12%.

The best smartphone / PDA device was clearly Research In Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry line.  Blackberry’s were cited as the best smartphone device by 42% of all respondents, including many AT&T store representatives.  Aside from the iPhone the Palm Treo line and the Nokia N-series, the N-95 in particular, were mentioned as best devices for this category was well.  Palm and Nokia were viewed as the top smartphone device by 4% of respondents each.   It appears that Blackberry devices maintain their popularity in spite of the entrance of the iPhone during the summer months while Nokia is a little weaker in this category than they were in our June survey.

The top music phone outside the AT&T network remains the Sony-Ericsson Walkman series which was rated number one by 17% of respondents followed by LG’s Chocolate phones which were viewed as best by 6% of respondents.  In non-U.S. markets the Sony-Ericsson series dominated this survey category.

At AT&T the answer to the “best” phone questions was  the iPhone from Apple.  This was also the case at AT&T stores to the question of which phone was the best for music. On the topic of best smartphone/PDA device the AT&T store reps were mixed. While some did recommend the iPhone again as the best device in this category models from Research In Motion’s Blackberry line were also mentioned frequently.

We will be running a new survey on these categories in a few weeks and hope to highlight changes or new trends in the cell phone space as 2007 moves into 2008.

In early May, we called 36 AT&T Wireless stores and found out that many of those stores carried waiting lists for the iPhone. This research lead us to believe that demand was perhaps stronger than anticipated for this hotly anticipated device. As a follow-up to that survey, we recently called 100 more stores to confirm or refute our earlier study. We asked three key questions of our survey respondents:

1. Is the retail outlet corporate owned or a franchise location?

2. Can the iPhone be pre-ordered?

3. Is there a waiting list?

We viewed the question on pre-ordering as one that implied the ability to better guarantee an iPhone when released. As reported widely last week, Apple released television ads highlighting that June 29th would be the launch date for the phone.

The results appear to confirm our previous study that demand for the iPhone is strong.

For the follow-up study, we called 100 AT&T Wireless stores - 57 were corporate owned and 43 were franchisee owned. 37% of the stores reported pre-order lists, while 55% of the surveyed stores reported waiting lists. Overall, there was very little difference between the corporate-owned and the franchised stores. The parity between the rates of pre-order lists suggests that corporate missives from AT&T are not altering behavior of the employees at the retail level. We continue to believe that employees are creating pre-order and waiting lists to lock-in iPhone customers and as a result, to lock-in sales commissions for themselves. The violation of corporate policy at corporate owned stores further validates the powerful demand building for the iPhone product in our opinion.

As we understand it, the official AT&T policy is no waiting lists for any phones, yet we have found significant waiting lists at many of the 136 AT&T stores we’ve called. We believe that the waiting lists, in violation of corporate policy, provide a picture into demand for the iPhone. We believe our survey results indicate that demand will be significant and that while great success is already expected for the iPhone, the actual demand may still exceed these expectations.

We have received a lot of feedback on our initial survey about waiting lists for the iPhone at AT&T Wireless stores. We are re-running the survey now and asking a new question that some of our readers believed was important - “Is the retail outlet corporate owned or a franchise (agent owned) AT&T Wireless store. We did a little research to verify that AT&T (formerly Cingular) had agent owned or frachise retail outlets and it appears they do judging by this article on the transition to AT&T marketing.

We are about half way done with our 100 store sample survey. We understand that official policy says no waiting lists. We believe the waiting lists are in existence and happening because of the large number of eager buyers wanting to get a hold of the iPhone when it launches. We will also state that we do not know when the phone will launch but most AT&T Wireless store reps and most of the writing in the news suggests the phone will ship some time in June 2007.

We will post the survey when we complete it. We can tell you the early results show a significant number of stores still telling us that they do have waiting lists for the phones. Not all, but many. We will post on the full suvey when it is completed.

We ran a recent survey asking Cingular wireless stores when they expected to get the iPhone in their shops, if they had a waiting list and how many names were on it. The results were interesting to say the least.

On the first question, the expected arrival date for the iPhone at Cingular stores ranged from June 15th to July generally. Some respondents claimed August and “winter 2007″ as the arrival date for the phone. Apple has cited June 15, but rumors have swirled that this date may be pushed back a bit (we agree and will get to this topic in a bit).

Our second question about wait lists resulted in 64% of stores reporting a waiting list (We called 36 stores for this survey). The remaining 36% said sales were on a “first come first serve” basis. It was apparent to us that stores reps were keeping their own waiting lists as most are compensated on commission basis it makes sense to us that waiting lists would proliferate as the launch date closes in. So it appears that 64% of Cingular reps are industrious capitalists.

The average number of names on each waiting list was 25 people (there are roughly 10,000 Cingular Wireless outlets). We did have one outlier in New York City, which we excluded from our average, that had 1,979 people on its waiting list. Another store said “we cannot give out that figure but the waiting list is running into the thousands”, another store reported that the number of calls for the phone was “indeterminable” as the numbers were massive.

Our take on our quick survey is that demand for the iPhone is probably going to surprise even Apple fanatics in the early days. We expect sell-outs and complaints about lack of availability of the phone. On this point, we have stumbled across some info that leads us to beleive that HonHai is having trouble manufacturing to schedule and is running behind due to some part delays. It appears that the initial 12 million unit run rate will not be available by June 15. Get your iPhone if you can…

We’ve been off for a while tweaking some of our methods and increasing the range of our coverage on channel checks. We’er back now and we believe you can expect to see a broader range of topics covered and in greater depth.We’ll start with Apple (the favorite topic of our small but growing audience apparently). We ran three new channel checks on Apple one on the iPod, one on the new Apple TV and one on the pending iPhone. We’ll start with the iPod survey. We found that 23 of 54 (43%) electronics retailers we spoke with recommended a competing MP3 player as the best one to buy. When we asked what was the BEST MP3 player in the market Apple iPod dominated with about 80% of respondents citing Apple. It looks to us like Creative Micro’s Zen MP3 product line is competing well at the high end of the MP3 market against iPod’s while the Sandisk Sansa product line is cited most often as a solid low-end option. The Sansa competes most directly with the Shuffle and Nano from Apple.

The most interesting finding for us was that at Best Buy some respondents were pushing the Insignia MP3 player product line. We had not heard of this brand but discovered that Insignia is the Best Buy white label brand (see story at http://www.gadgetell.com/2006/12/best-buys-insignia-mp3-players/). It occurs to has this has the potential to create a little channel conflict between Best Buy and Apple at some point, but for now the Insignia does not seem to be taking a lot of market share.

Apple TV is now in stores as we write this. It was not available generally when we conducted our survey. The takeway from our survey on Apple TV was that most respondents felt it would be a good product but would serve a niche Apple-centric market.

iPhone was the most interesting survey for us even as the launch date is debated at other web sites and by commentators. We found two key indicators of good demand for the iPhone in our survey. First, Cingular stores are taking names for a waiting list for these phones. In our experience this rarely happens in the cell phone industry. Second, Cingular store representatives are encouraging us to wait for the iPhone and forego buying a new phone today. Again, this is almost unheard of, especially when we consider that most cell phone salespeople are compensated for hitting daily sales quotas - driving them to try and sell phones today, not threee months from now. Apple has publicly targeted 10M iPhone units as its early sales goal. We understand that Apple is having 12M built. We believe that the iPhone will sell out and that unit sales will be over the 12M initial production run that Apple has ordered. We believe that Hon Hai (AKA Foxconn) is the manufacturere for iPhone product.

We have completed our first survey of the year on mobile e-mail for personal use (as opposed to corporate solutions) and found that Blackberry devices from Research In Motion (RIMM) are the most recommended devices while Gmail from Google (GOOG) was the most often recommended e-mail solution, primarily because the solution is free to the user with a wireless data plan.We surveyed North American and European wireless carrier stores. We asked if mobile e-mail was an option, how much it costs and which device the respondent would recommend for e-mail users. our survey respondents are skewed towards North America where 90% of our responses came from while 10% come from Western Europe. In North America our break-down between the big four carriers (Verizon, Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile) is close to even.

Almost every wireless carrier representative said that e-mail was growing in terms of consumer interest and demand. Most phones seem to be web capable and by extension capable of receiving mobile e-mail from a variety of e-mail solutions including HotMail, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Google and corporate solutions using Microsoft Outlook.

The best devices to buy to optimize the mobile e-mail experience according to our survey respondents were the following:

Blackberry devices (Generally, no specific models were mentioned) from Research In Motion - 28%

Motorola Q - 16%

Palm Treo 700p - 8%

Cingular 8525 - 8%

Sprint PPC-6700 - 8%

LG Chocolate - 4%

LG Envy - 4%

Not mentioned widely in our survey but apparently selling very well is the Sidekick 3 from Danger that is sold exclusively through T-Mobile. Some T-Mobile respondents reported that this phone was out of stock and was the most popular for consumers looking to use e-mail and text messaging.
Mobile e-mail appears to be growing and the need for a data plan to access e-mail (even if it is a free service like gmail) bodes well for wireless carriers and their propspects for increasing data usage on cell phones.

Well, we see that the Motorola RAZR, in multiple colors and the Motorola KRZR are now available on the Sprint Web Site. We had targeted November 3 (last Friday) and cannot claim complete victory since we did not check the site on the 3rd. At any rate, we feel pretty good about this prediction and expect to see the Motorola SLVR on the Sprint site some time this week.

Motorola’s impact on sales of Sany and Samsung phones will be of some interest post the launch of the Motorola phones and we will channel check this topic in a few weeks.

We have concluded our survey on the Sprint launch of Motorola phones. The key dates we got were Nov. 3 or Nov. 10. We believe the evidence suggests November 3 makes sense as November, to electronics sellers means Christmas season, so waiting an additional week does not make alot of sense from either companies point of view (S or MOT). The question we asked was the following:

1. Do you sell Motorola phones for the Sprint Network, not the Nextel Network?
2. Are you expecting to get Motorola phones?
3. When?
4. What models?

We called Sprint retail outlets across the U.S. over the past 10 days to gather our survey data.

Key findings from our survey are the following:

Many sprint stores already are selling the Motorola c290 which is a low-end candy bar phone.

The Sprint retail workers are expecting to get the RAZR, SLVR and KRZR. No PEBL and no Q in the line-up for sprint.

Silverdale, Washington (a Seattle suburb) seems to be a test market for Motorola phones as the store there had the RAZR already. Could Seattle suburbs be the test market? Could be in our mind. Las Vegas has been a big test market for Sprint in the past but maybe it was time for a change.