The tablets market segment is fun to watch. While there is no doubt that Apple “owns” the segment it is interesting to note that it has the lowest satisfaction score compared to the competition.

Given the enthusiasm of Apple fans and popularity of the original iPad, I wonder if the bar was set too high for many iPad 2 purchasers. Digging deeper into the details of Customer Experiences we can see that a lot of negative comments are focused on quality of the camera embedded into the tablet.

Indeed the “focused” listening provides specific metrics that show difference between customer expectations and their actual experience with this attribute of Customer Experience.

The analysis shows that Blackberry Playbook is a clear leader when it comes to Customer Experience with picture quality. Considering widely held belief (which I do not share) that Apple does not do market research it would be interesting to see if they address the camera/picture quality issue in the next edition of this popular product.

We used Opinion Miner® software to analyze 1,103 customer generated reviews, published online before May, 29 2011, of the tablets listed above to generate these findings. The scores are calculated to the two point scale from 0 (unacceptable) to 2 (delighted) with 1=100% satisfied (i.e. experience matches expectations).

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 met 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.