So the statistics that recently came out are telling. According to a report from Daniel Eran Dilger in AppleInsider, iPhone purchasers are more than twice as likely to want to buy another as those who bought Android-based devices.

The article explains it all, so I’ll be brief. The iPhone and the iOS earned a 59% loyalty figure, which isn’t great, but certainly positive. At the same time, only 25% of owners of Android OS smartphones were apt to want to go through it all again, at least for the same brand.

Faring somewhat better is the Blackberry, which garners a 35% loyalty rating. Windows mobile, in case you’re wondering, stands at 21%, but it’s not at all certain if purchasers of Windows Phone 7 gear made much of a dent in that survey, since they just came to market.

On the other hand, there’s also that report that Android OS gear is outselling Microsoft-based gear by a substantial fifteen-to-one ratio. Moreover, when I heard news of a two-for-one Windows Phone 7 fire sale from AT&T so soon after these smartphones first appeared, I had to wonder whether there are severe teething pains involved. While it may not presage another Microsoft Kin debacle, there may be problems afoot.

Returning to the survey: A total of 2,653 users were contacted in China, Brazil, Britain Germany, Spain, and the United States. It may well be that some portion of any lack of complete brand loyalty may actually be due to carrier issues, rather than the product itself. This is particularly true in the U.S., where AT&T has reception problems in some areas.

Overall, however, Google ought to be concerned that high percentages of customers aren’t happy with their Android OS gear. What this means is that, once their wireless contracts are up, they’re likely to consider someone else’s handset and/or operating system. On the other hand, with the lack of a distinctive brand identity for Android, it’s quite possible dissatisfied owners will just select a different smartphone, and end up with the same OS, although it may not be readily apparent until they take it home.

When it comes to other products, the fledgling Google TV platform may already be in trouble. Accompanied by tepid reviews, there’s a report that Sony is already knocking $100 off their $399 entrant into this nascent category. You’d think that a brand new platform wouldn’t suffer from such an insult, but it sort of makes sense.

I mean, Google TV seems largely to be a melding of a keyboard-based Internet access system, similar to the failed WebTV, to which some custom apps with the requisite targeted Google ads have been added. Talk about creating a product for which there’s no demonstrated need.

In contrast, it’s not clear yet that the Apple TV is necessarily flying off the shelves. The first sales report had it that 250,000 units had been sold early in this new set top box’s lifecycle. I suppose that’s not bad, and it won’t be clear until the holiday season is over whether Apple can rev that up to a million or two. But it doesn’t yet appear that the upgraded, downsized Apple TV is destined to shed the hobby label anytime soon.

My personal experience with an Apple TV is reasonably positive, but there have been glitches. On several occasions, while streaming an HD movie direct from Apple’s iTunes servers rather than my own network, playback would halt to allow for an extended period of rebuffering. Indeed, when you first rent a title, there’s normally a delay so that a fair portion of the download can be stored inside the device’s 4GB internal memory. That way, if your Internet access slows or stops for a time, you might still be able to get through the entire presentation before the data store runs out.

Now I have an extremely fast, solid cable Internet connection. While watching a movie Sunday evening, playback repeatedly halted during the flick’s final 20 minutes. But my ISP’s connection never slowed. While the endless buffering process occurred for the third time, I downloaded a small file to test online performance, and it was fine. My iPhone, located in the same room as the Apple TV, was also able to achieve solid performance with the same Wi-Fi connection.

Perhaps Apple’s servers were overloaded as new customers, who bought an Apple TV on Black Friday, were trying them out. I don’t have the answers, but I will inquire of Apple to see if there’s any hope for a meaningful response. I also hope this isn’t repeated. That last 20 minute segment was none too pleasant to watch. In the end, it took over an hour to finish that movie.

I am not prepared to give a buyer’s remorse verdict on Apple TV yet, however. Aside from this and a previous bout of possible signal loss, it has worked quite well. I only wish Apple would offer more services, such as Hulu, although I grant that option conceivably competes with iTunes to some degree, and it may not sit well with Apple’s desires to take control of as much of the user options as possible. But there’s still YouTube, Netflix, and Flickr. From a user’s standpoint, having more programming choices would be a good thing, and would substantially improve Apple TV’s chances for success.

Remember, too, that Apple earns the lion’s share of their profits from the sale of hardware, not by offering movies, music, and apps. Giving customers more choices on the Apple TV has to be a good thing. But whether it is destined to ultimately become a mainstream product, rather than an ongoing experiment, is anyone’s guess. I just don’t know.

Whenever I see another TV spot touting a Microsoft product, I have to wonder whether their ad agencies have a clue about how to create positive customer awareness. I mean, those ads are pathetic.

Take the one I saw recently, where some coworkers are pondering a solution to some sort of business problem, and one says it’s time to go to the cloud. Yes, my friends, the magical, mystical cloud, which is the common label for storing and working on things online. That may include movies and TV shows, but also increasingly represents a source for collaborative work in the business world.

By putting one’s data on a central server farm, there’s the advantage of having it available wherever you are, regardless of which device you might use to get online, be it a Mac, PC or mobile gadget of some sort. That, of course, is a good thing; that is, until or unless you’re not able to get Internet access, or a server failure makes your stuff inaccessible.

The problem with Microsoft, however, is that they make this “to the cloud” announcement something akin to a lame attempt to create a compelling message. But it reminds me of that famous 1960?s TV show, where Batman, the caped crusader, says to his cohort, Robin, “to the batmobile.”

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On several occasions, Apple executives have been famously quoted as saying, in response to questions about matching the prices of cheap PC gear, that they didn’t know how to make junk. Of course, the critics will usually claim Apple is run by a bunch of greedy so-and-sos and all they want to do is extract as much cash from you as possible.

The skeptics will seldom admit that it’s not just a matter of a company wanting to earn a decent profit, but to provide extra value for their customers.

In contrast, most of the rest of the PC industry is busy flooding the market with loads of sometimes barely different models in hopes that one or two will catch fire and deliver decent sales. The netbook seems mostly an attempt to get PC users to just sell something, anything, during a time of economic downturn. At roughly $300 a pop, these shrunken note-books have demonstrated no innovation whatever, just a rush to the bottom and efforts to make something as cheaply as possible, without regard to whether they even deliver satisfactory performance.

The netbook phenomenon, however, appears to have been short-lived. It may be that the iPad’s arrival has made it obvious that, with a little more money, a really usable computer can be bought. What’s more, PC makers are beginning to offer supposedly full-featured portables for not much more than a netbook, so the latter may be best offered for $200 or less.

Now this is not a survey, but I did notice several netbooks on the closeout counter at the local Sam’s Club, so maybe the point has been reached where customers have begun to realize that Apple was right about that cheap stuff all along.

Unfortunately, someone new to the PC marketplace, and there are such people still, may not understand why a PC note-book can be sold for $400, yet the cheapest MacBook or MacBook Air is $999. Just why is the Apple so expensive?

Such suspicions may be compounded by the unfortunate efforts of our largest product review publication, Consumer Reports. Now CR, as I’ve said previously, prides itself on being incorruptible. They do not take advertising from third parties, the magazine is published by a non-profit corporation, and they buy all of the products they test in retail outlets. Hence, there’s no opportunity for a manufacturer to build a “trick” version that will work better than the units sold to regular customers.

Of course, having reviewed electronics gear for years, I can tell you from first-hand experience that I’ve never received a “ringer,” or something I could be suspicious about. The very same defects that affect the shipping versions afflict the ones I’ve received direct from the manufacturer or its marketing agency. Indeed, on some occasions, the well-worn review sample may actually function worse.

Alas, CR also clouds the issue by comparing Macs with cheaper PC gear, without regard to whether the core features, hardware configurations, and bundled software, are comparable. They fail to distinguish the well-known differences between Mac OS X and Windows, and thus leave the impression with their readers that there is no difference. The Mac is just a pretty, overpriced PC.

In any case, it also seems clear that more and more people are realizing that it’s better to pay for value than buy an inferior product that may be less useful and perhaps fail quickly. That probably explains why Apple’s sales have mostly grown faster than the competition in recent years. Customer surveys tell the tale, demonstrating that large numbers of people place Apple on the top of their shopping lists for the next few months.

A recent NPD Group consumer survey revealed that some 11% were planning to buy an iPad between now and February 2011. Just as fascinating is the fact that use of the iPad appears to increase the longer they’re owned. It grows from 15 hours a week after two months to 18 hours a week after three months.

I’m more curious about what these iPad owners are giving up. The PC? Smartphones? Or do they just allocate more and more of their busy lives to Apple’s newest iconic gadget?

Of course, this explains the rush by other companies to somehow steal Apple’s thunder. In the PC space, that’s often done simply by using cheaper parts, or removing features, but with tablets, Apple has already set a price for the iPad that’s hard to beat.

What’s more, the customer is clearly not listening, as higher and higher numbers of would-be buyers prefer Macs. According to a ChangeWave survey, some 36% of buyers who plan to buy new note-books in the next three months expect to buy a Mac. Even more intriguing is the fact that this level of interest has grown by 11% over the past month alone, which may indicate that the updated MacBook Air might be a factor. These increases come, in large part, at the expense of Dell and HP.

Or perhaps they are just having second thoughts about buying the cheap junk far too many PC box assemblers continue to offer.

So after hearing that smartphones equipped with the Google Android OS are selling at a faster clip than the iPhone, maybe you’ve been tempted to check one out. So you go to your neighborhood wireless handset dealer and ask about an Android phone.

“A what”?

Now this doesn’t mean store personnel wouldn’t know, but Google has a branding problem. Yes, there’s a Droid phone of one sort or another, usually from Motorola, which is offered from Verizon Wireless. But that’s about the closest the product name usually gets to Android.

The flashy ads for Droids often resemble nothing less than a computer game, rather than a productive smartphone that’s suitable for personal or business use. These promotions seldom say anything about the Android OS, or why it makes one of those phones better.

Of course, the wireless carriers who place those ads aren’t selling Android any more than they’re selling Windows Phone 7, or even the iPhone if they’re lucky enough to carry them. No, they want to sign you up for a two-year postpaid contract (meaning you are billed rather than pay up front). The handset, regardless of maker, is just the icing on the cake, and they don’t care a whit which one you buy. That’s not what they’re selling, so you can even get special discounts or perhaps a two-for-one deal if that’s what needed to get you to sign on the dotted line.

This pathetic state of affairs works against customers, obviously. Worse, the Android OS, as successful as it’s been, has few distinguishing elements. There are minimal restrictions imposed on manufacturers and carriers by Google. So they are free to configure the open source software as they wish, including dumping bundled apps and replacing them with their own. So Android’s decent camera app may be supplanted by the junkware imposed by your wireless carrier. Even worse, the skin or OS theme can be altered to have it conform with the requirements of maker or carrier.

In the end, the customer be damned!

So while switching from one iPhone to another, even next year’s model, will mean some hardware improvements, and there will be new iOS features to add to the mix, the basic interface and usability will be substantially unaltered. Although there are operational differences from the very first iPhone to the iPhone 4, it’ll mostly be in the features added to the iOS. Most of the things I do can be accomplished in essentially the same fashion on both, absent the added capabilities. I could literally have gone to sleep in 2007 with iPhone in hand, and awakened last week to find a new one in its place, and not be utterly confused.

Moving from one Android device to another, particularly from a different carrier, may be almost akin to learning a totally different interface, from a very different product. You can’t even be assured that they are running the same version of the OS, even if they were built the very same day in the same factory. Each manufacturer or carrier will decide which versions of Android to use, and when and if you deserve to be fed an update. That’s their decision, not yours, although you can go online, get the update, and hack the gadget with the update you want.

But why?

Why should you have to hack your smartphone to keep it up to date? Besides, when you get past the standard apps, just what range of software can you get? Well that, my friends, presents an even greater dilemma, because not all Android apps will work on all the hardware. Once the OS differences are considered, the inner workings vary all over the place, as manufacturers install different processors, support chips and even the screens. Resolutions are all over the place, and app developers have to account for such variations, or just devise multiple versions.

Yes, but isn’t that the price to pay for an open platform?

The theory goes that Apple is bad, because they want to control the whole widget and ensure that you have a consistent, relatively safe, user experience, and can be assured that virtually all the over 300,000 apps available at the App Store are actually compatible with your smartphone. Most work just fine on an iPad, though you’ll want the version tailored for that device. What a dreadful way to treat paying customers, right? You get something that pretty much just works out of the box — and I can confirm that from every single generation iPhone, since I’ve spent lots of time with all of them. There are software glitches from time to time, but few directly impact the basic functionality of your iPhone. If there’s a serious bug, Apple will fix it and let you download it as soon as it’s available via iTunes on the Mac or Windows. You don’t have to depend on the whims of a carrier or handset maker to push that update to you, even if there’s a critical security problem involved.

In case you’re wondering about Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, well AT&T has already put a two-for-one deal in place. You’d hardly expect that, unless they’ve had difficulty moving product. Maybe the handwriting is already on the wall for Microsoft.

Sure, it’s up to every customer to decide what product is best. In the end, if the carrier you want or prefer doesn’t have an iPhone, you may not have the choice. Then again, the iPhone is expected to arrive at Verizon Wireless and more overseas carriers in the months to come. Then there will be fewer excuses.