Few smartphone owners are loyal to their brand

LONDON: The booming smartphone market shows no sign of slowing but manufacturers will have to fight hard to keep their customers as smartphone owners show little loyalty to their current brands, a GfK survey shows.

The survey, to be published on Monday, found that 56 percent of smartphone owners in key global markets were keeping their options open about which phone they would buy next, with only Apple commanding a significant degree of loyalty.

Features such as Wi-Fi, GPS and high-resolution cameras now commonplace, owners of Internet-enabled phones are increasingly concerned with the ease of accessing attractive services to enhance their devices, often through app stores.

" If a phone doesn't do what it says it will do or what the owner hopes it will do, the maker will lose loyalty."Ryan Garner, the lead analyst on the survey, told Reuters.

The survey found that just 25 percent of smartphone owners planned to stay loyal to the operating system running their phone, with loyalty highest among Apple users at 59 percent, and lowest for Microsoft's phone software, at 21 percent.

Of users of RIMs BlackBerrys, 35 percent said they would stay loyal. The figure was 28 percent for users of phones running Google's Android software, and 24 percent for users of Nokia symbian phones.

GfK conducted the survey of 2,653 mobile phone users in Brazil, Germany, Spain, Britain, the United States and China online during October and November.