Motorola, Sanyo lead the way in customer satisfaction

The latest customer satisfaction study from J.D. Power & Associates finds market-leader Motorola tied with Sanyo for the number one spot in the 2007 U.S. Wireless Mobile Phone Evaluation Study, a project ranking cell phone manufacturers across several categories.

(Sidebar: Does “Wireless Mobile Phone� really flow better than “Cell Phone�?)

Motorola excelled in the areas of physical design, operation, and features; Sanyo took top honors in operation and battery functionality. Samsung and LG also earned above-average customer satisfaction marks in this year’s study. While Motorola is certainly a dominant player in the American cell phone market, Sanyo is somewhat less known – perhaps because many of its most popular models, like the Katana, are more closely associated with a carrier (Sprint) than with the manufacturer itself.

Another interesting result courtesy of the people at J.D. Power: a whopping 69% of all cell phones fall in the clamshell category; that’s way up from 50% in 2006 (29% of phones are candybar-style, and representatives from the emerging slider-phone family make up 2%).