Apple and the iPhone have placed first in a customer satisfaction survey targeting business users of smartphones, according to J.D. Power and Associates. The survey evaluated phone makers using a thousand-point score, with devices ranked in categories of descending priority; these included "ease of operation," "operating system," "physical design," "handset features" and "battery aspects." Apple scored customer satisfaction of 778, mainly due to the ease-of-use, design and feature criteria.

Just behind Apple are BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, with 703, and Samsung, scoring 701. At the bottom of the list is Palm, earning just 644 on the back of its Treo smartphones.

J.D. Power notes that a full quarter of business smartphone owners have complained of software problems. Of these people 44 percent complained about having to reboot at least once a week during the past year, while another 34 percent had apps break or freeze once a week.

In terms of reasons for choosing a company's phones, the top five included Internet capability (45 percent), e-mail (41 percent), design (39 percent), Bluetooth functions (37 percent) and keyboard format (37 percent).

Roughly 34 percent of phone owners said they download third-party apps, but most of these remain games, with productivity apps placing second, and travel apps falling into third.