BlackBerry Playbook customers send mixed messages

The Playbook introduction caused a lot of controversy well before it was actually released with

speculations about its battery life problems wildly spread all over internet. The decision to go with its

proprietary operating system was also made with a lot of criticism in social media. However since the

Playbook started shipping and customers had a chance to form their own opinion, the results of their

opinions analysis did not produce a crystal clear picture yet. One thing seems to emerge though – it is a

lot better product than most people have expected. This writing is based on the analysis of 886

customer reviews of their experience with these tablets.

Below is a screenshot of the dashboard with a subset of attributes that are most important to customers

(statistically determined). The bars represent measurements of the difference between customer

expectations and there experience with each attribute.

It appears that Battery life issue was either blown out of proportions by pre-release speculations, or

miraculously corrected by RIM engineers before the product started shipping, as the Playbook

customers report that it exceeded their expectations by 21%.

QNX operating system appears to be a big hit with the customers as it exceeded their expectations by

35% and scored at much higher customer perception levels than iOS and Android.

What is surprising that overall general satisfaction score from the Playbook customers is quite low in

spite the fact the most of the important attribute’s scores are positive. When I clicked on the general

satisfaction bar of the Playbook, the negative opinion snippets (customer insight) was focused around

the lack of content and applications for the device.