Smartphone Market Analysis Using Dynamic Multi-Criteria Decision Methods

The iPhone introduced an innovative multi-touch interface to satisfy customers’ attractive requirements. Thereafter, most smartphone manufacturers begin to mimic this innovation in their new generation products for a dramatically increasing demand market. Although the smartphone market includes many types and functions of products, there are no smart- phone selection methods to support customers to select an effective smartphone. In order to cope with such a problem, this paper proposes a multi-criteria selection method to evaluate operating systems and hardware and software specifications using AHP and SMART-ROC, respectively. For illustration, this paper uses the proposed methods to analyze the customer utility and benefit-cost of 24 popular smartphones in the market. The results show that the most popular smartphone does not have the best cost-benefit. This paper suggests customers select smartphones by referring to the cost-benefit approach except when they are looking for a communications product for a special purpose.