Are iPhone users really that bad? We’re not buying it. It’s odd that a consumer electronics outlet would sponsor a study that paints such a lousy picture of iPhone owners, but that’s exactly what shopping site Retrevo.com has done. (Perhaps they want to sell more Blackberry phones?) For whatever reason, the results of their recent report on smartphone owners in the U.S. has returned some unflattering figures about those who own Apple’s ubiquitous handheld, the iPhone, as compared to the more business-minded folks who choose a Blackberry instead.

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According to this study, iPhone owners are more likely to judge potential partners based on their gadgets and not their college degree, handle breakups via email or text, and yet somehow still think of themselves as “intellectuals” despite the fact that they spend more time than their counterparts texting, watching videos, and visiting adult sites on their phones.

Really?

If you’re an iPhone owner yourself, you’re probably going to be taken a bit aback by these findings. For example, the study claims that “cool gadgets” make a person three times more attractive to an iPhone owner than a college degree. Meanwhile “old” gadgets are a turnoff to one in three iPhone users. And yet, if that person spends a little too much time with said gadgets, one in four iPhone owners will break up with them. One in three will do it via email or text message.

Taken on their own, it’s hard to say whether these stats are indicative of anything about iPhone owners specifically, or if they could apply to any group of smartphone-owning mobile users. That’s why the report compares the iPhone and Blackberry owners on each topic. When studied this way, iPhone owners beat Blackberry owners in every category where “winning” is actually the equivalent of being a materialistic, flaky, fickle dolt…well, at least in our opinion.

To spin the findings even further in Blackberry’s favor, one of the questions involved asking the mobile users how they “see” themselves. 40% of the iPhone owners claimed they were an “intellectual” while only 36% of Blackberry users said the same. Propped up against the other results, it’s an almost laughable claim.

Don’t Buy this Hype

Clearly, this survey wasn’t meant to be an in-depth examination of the smartphone toting population – in fact, it’s more likely just a publicity stunt to generate talk about Retrevo. Given the questions asked, there were bound to be some “rather interesting” findings, no matter how the respondents answered. And by keeping the sample size to a low number – only 445 individuals – there’s no guarantee that these folks are representative of the population at large in any way. After all, who signs up for online surveys anyway? While the panel of participants was distributed across gender, age, income and location in the U.S., what’s undisclosed is how the questions were asked – was this done scientifically or were they leading questions designed to generate these sorts of results?  We’d bet on the latter.

Still, you have to wonder if there isn’t a tiny bit of truth hiding in these numbers somewhere. Could it be that those who buy Apple’s smartphone are a little more wrapped up in mobile life than those whose smartphone purchase probably had more to do with accessing company email in a timely fashion? That may be possible, but that wouldn’t exactly be an incredible reveal if so, now would it?

Discuss

The number of 15-24 year olds in the U.K. visiting social networking sites reached 6.8 million in June, up 14 percent compared to the previous year, according to a new report from comScore.

The overall audience of social networkers in this age group is up substantially during the past year, but the time spent on social networking sites is down 9 percent. The overall decrease in time spent on the sites appears to be due to younger users spending less time on secondary social networking sites.

"Recent reports have suggested that 15-24 year olds in the U.K. are moving away from social networking sites because they’re no longer cool as older users have encroached on their virtual space. comScore research indicates that is simply not the case," said Mike Read, SVP and Managing Director, comScore Europe.

"In fact, more 15-24 year olds are using social networking sites than a year ago, so there isn’t any particular aversion to the activity. What does appear to be happening is that younger users are beginning to consolidate around Facebook and are spending less time on competing sites."

Younger users are increasingly moving towards Facebook as their main social networking destination, even though Facebook has a significantly older user profile than MySpace and Bebo. Specifically, 77 percent of Facebook visitors are age 25 or older, compared to 65 percent of Bebo visitors and 69 percent of MySpace visitors.

"These data suggest that not only are younger social networkers not avoiding their older counterparts, but they are actually gravitating towards a site that skews more heavily towards users age 25 and older," added Read.

"It’s likely that the age of one’s peers on a social networking site is not a critical factor in how 15-24 year olds will spend their time online. But as people’s digital media lives become increasingly fragmented, users are craving the simplicity of fewer platforms – and the dominant social networking platform right now appears to be Facebook."