Samsung Galaxy S4 buzz significantly trailing iPhone 5

The latest Harris Buzz report for April is now available. See here to download the full, free report.

This is now our 27th edition of Buzz. Each month we take a national poll via the Harris PollTM Omnibus and test awareness and excitement of the latest news stories and releases in technology and entertainment.

One of the most interesting releases we tested in the latest report is the unveiling of the Samsung Galaxy S4.

We can take a look at whether it's created the same sort of Buzz as other flagship phones, including the iPhone 5.




Let's take a look at where Samsung's new flagship smartphone ranks for excitement against some other notable smartphone and tablet releases over the last couple of years...

Samsung are the leading smartphone seller right now and it launched the Galaxy S4 with a heap of razzmatazz. We see its Excitement Buzz towards the top of the list but not right at the top. iPhone 5's buzz at its time of release is significantly higher.

I thought the S4 announcement was significant in that I can't recall a launch from any other smartphone/tablet company that could rival it for the level of anticipation it generated, aside from iPhone and iPad announcements. And the launch could hardly be described as subtle - it was a huge fanfare event from Samsung.

While Samsung is substantially outselling Apple in the smartphone business, we do see however that it still needs to catch up for Excitement in the general market. Bear in mind this is national polling, not polling of smartphone purchase intenders. Apple has now had a solid five years or so of fanfare events to launch its mobile products, so Samsung needs to continue to generate the same sort of buzz for its launches in the future.

The full report, which also includes a host of other launches and news stories (see below) can be downloaded for free by clicking on this link.

And here is the full list of stuff we included in the April Buzz report:

·         BBC Television Centre closes with Madness concert

·         BBC to premiere a new Peter Kay sitcom on BBC iPlayer

·         BioShock Infinite video game

·         Comic Relief 2013 raises record £75m

·         The Croods movie

·         Dell company receives bid for a takeover

·         Gears of War: Judgement video game

·         New David Bowie album ‘The Next Day’

·         O2 launches ‘Tu Go’ app to challenge Skype

·         Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone unveiled

·         SimCity video game

·         Trance movie

·         Yahoo! buys teenager’s Summly mobile app for £18m

Tablet research - Nexus 7 trails iPad by a large margin for awareness & excitement

The latest Harris Buzz report is available, the 17th edition - click here to download the free report.

As always, we look at 13 new releases and technology/media/entertainment news stories in July, including Andy Murray's sobbing exit from Wimbledon, measuring awareness, discussion and excitement on a nationally representative GB Harris Poll sample.

We also covered the Nexus 7, the first tablet from Google, a 7 inch device made by Asus. For me, this is the most interesting story because we can compare its Buzz with that of all three iPads. We always test at time of   launch, so all the results are comparable.

What do we see for the Nexus 7? Let's take a look at awareness and excitement.

For familiarity we see Apple's products topping the list with the last two iterations building on the media frenzy of the first. Nexus 7 is the most recent tablet and its level of awareness is more comparable to that seen for Galaxy Tab, Playbook and Touchpad. I've put the date of the fieldwork (when we measured awareness) on each bar to be absolutely clear how these are benchmarked. Apple's lead (from iPad 2) is not quite double that of Nexus 7, but it's not far off that mark.

Now let's look at excitement. Below you'll see the iPad reigning supreme, well ahead of the rest. Nexus 7 is again roughly on par with the Galaxy Tab.

What does it mean for Google and Nexus? And for any tablet maker other than Apple for that matter? Well, Apple's grip on the market has been firm, and it remains so. We shouldn't take this, in any way, that the Nexus 7 is a failure. It's not. It's been critically acclaimed and it's sold out. But these graphs do show what a steep hill Apple competitors have to climb to gain the attention of the public and the mainstream tablet buyer.

And this data also shows that it is the iPad that retains the most excitement when people think about tablets. There's something about the iPad that generates a buzz that other manufacturers are yet to match.

All the Buzz reports from which this data is mined can be found here.

Olympic Torch Relay pips Samsung Galaxy S3 in latest Buzz report

Our latest Buzz report is available to download - for free. Click here to get it.

Of all the things we measured this month we see the Olympic Torch relay, Men In Black 3 and the new flagship Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone heading the list of things that are most exciting the British general public.

A new Buzz report will be released next month and, as usual, I'll post a link here.