Apple has pulled off another hat-trick in capturing the top rankings in three separate but mainstream categories in a new poll from Harris Poll EquiTrend. Like last year, the company has again been ranked the top brand for computers, tablets and smartphones as decided by more than 38,500 American buyers that were asked to rank brands on over 1,500 products in 155 categories. The polling company also noted that consumers placed Apple in the top 30 of all 1,500 brands evaluated for "momentum," indicating its good relationship with consumers will continue into the future.
The poll measure a brand's "emotion, fit, trust and performance" with consumers, while the "momentum" was measured by a brand's "energy, ubiquity, future outlook, leadership and popularity." Although Apple's quality score dropped slightly in this year's polling, the "momentum" score increase, driven by increases in "ubiquity" and "popularity" rankings.
Apple was picked as the top computer brand of the year, followed again this year by HP. Dell moved into third place due to increases in the "familiarity" and "purchase consideration" scores, with Sony taking fourth place. In tablets, Apple again took top brand for its iPad, with Amazon ranking second for its Kindle Fire series. Google's Nexus line of tablets placed third and HP's Slate series rounded out the top four, all of which performed above the average ranking for tablets. The Surface, the PlayBook, the Xoom and Nook HD were also ranked but did not rise above the overall average score.
Unsurprisingly, the iPhone also won for the second consecutive year for top smartphone, beating second-place HTC (a rare bit of good news for the troubled Android handset maker), Samsung phones and LG phones in that order. Apple and Android handset seller Verizon repeated last year's win for best Pre-Paid Mobile Carrier Brand, and won best Mobile Network Brand for the third time running. AT&T ranked second in both categories of carrier.
In other categories, HP was picked as consumers' favorite brand of printers/scanners, followed by Canon, Kodak, Samsung and Xerox in that order. Newegg won the top spot for online Computer Retailer of the year, with Microsoft in second, the Apple Store in third and Best Buy in fourth. The poll, which was carried out between January and February of this year, and used consumers ages 15 and over -- a model Harris said it also uses for its political polling.
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