Google study shows that most users care more about the device (28%), the device and the service (24%), than just the service (48%).
To T-Mobile and AT&T this is not news. They've both put together exclusive deals (initially) to deploy new devices from Apple (AT&T) and Google/HTC (T-Mobile) and these deals have brought subscribers into their networks by the hundreds of thousands per quarter.
Also, 75% of in-store buyers searched online to educate themselves, while 25% of folks shop online to avoid sales people.
It's not surprising to me that most folks search online first before visiting the mobile store. From my experiences in mobile phone stores (Sprint in Plano TX and T-Mobile in Shrewsbury MA), the waiting in queue was the pain. Sprint store in Plano (on Preston Rd) had the shared queue (one line with multiple servers) which is the most efficient and on average, least waiting, while T-Mobile had hardly any queuing space, and worse, independent queues for each agent.
