Teens rate top tech brands
'Apple... no, yeah, but... Sony, right... no, like, Nokia' etc, etc.
Teenagers are often berated for their pimply faces, indolence and bolshiness, but they’re tomorrow’s gadget buyers. And according to a recently published survey, they’re no longer so bovvered by Nokia mobile phones.
The Global Yoof Survey – an annual listing of what’s hot and what’s not among today's Kevins and Perrys – discovered that Nokia’s global popularity as a brand has slipped by eight per cent, down to 21 per cent.
It’s still the most popular handset brand amongst the 112,000 kids surveyed across 30 countries, but Sony Ericsson’s fighting the Finnish phone firm for fans by filling the number two spot with an 18 per cent share of the vote.
Apple didn’t even feature in the top ten of cool phone brands last year, but it’s now at fifth place globally.
But which handset brands do UK teenagers consider worthy of a swipe from their Visa Debit cards? SE's apparently rated as the coolest, followed by Samsung, Nokia, LG and Apple.
Blighty’s Vicky Pollards and Laren Coopers also gave their PoV about other electronics brands and named Apple hippest of all consumer electronics brands, followed by Sony.
Nintendo’s the coolest videogame brand over here. Microsoft pipped Sony to the post to become the second coolest videogame brand.
Manchester United’s apparently the most favoured footie team among the UK's teenage boys. Pah! Kids – what do they know? ®
COMMENTS
@Frank Bough
"Yeah, couldn't possibly have anything to do with the iPod being the best overall PMP, could it?"
iPod is an also-ran technically. Nothing wrong with them, but nothing special other than marketing. You can get same or better for less money by avoiding the marketing-driven group-think.
iPhones, OTOH do appear to be game-leaders, for now at least. Pity about the company in charge though. I rate Apple on par with Sony for anti-social corporate attitudes. (ex indi-Apple dev from the '90's, so bitterness towards the company is to be expected ;-).
re: @ jeremy
Look it up...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.
@Toastan Butter
The Nokias also manage nicely as USB sticks... I have no problems dragging and dropping files onto my Nokia. That said, the only thing it needs is the USB drivers for the Nokia in question, but you can download them from the Nokia site. Not the end of the world, really.
Where did Nokia go wrong ?
I remember seeing a documentary yeeeeeeears ago when mobiles were becoming the must-have item for teens. It was Nokia or nothing for them ! Personally speaking, I found the Nokia UI of that time to be tuned to perfection for accessing all the features you'd want as intuitively as possible.
Nowadays, lower-end Nokia's really are pants and there's little to differentiate them from all the others in the marketplace. SEs are soooo much friendlier and more intuitive to use. We've got about 7 or 8 mobiles of one sort of another in the house and I'd choose the SE over all the others in a flash. It's not exactly top-of-the-range, either; £30 PAYG out of Asda, but it can take photos and video and you can use it as a media player for MP3's and MP4 video. Oh, and it connects directly to your PC USB and acts as a memory stick - no crap Windows-only applications to download/upload piccies, etc.
@Frank Bough
"Yeah, couldn't possibly have anything to do with the iPod being the best overall PMP, could it?"
Actually, it couldn't. PMPs are commodity components jammed into a plastic case in the far east with some software. Technically products from Sansa, Creative etc are as good, with marginal differences in the user interface. The big difference is that Apple did a first class job of branding the iPod/iTunes link and selling the package. Teenagers are particularly susceptible to that kind of marketing and do tend to follow the crowd, without evaluating boring factors like value for money. That's not a criticism of Apple - with next to no technical differentiation, they found a way to capture the market.
