A customer satisfaction survey ranking smartphones features and desirability in South Korea awarded Apple's iPhone 5s a widening lead over domestic rivals including LG, Samsung and Pantech.

Marketing Insight, a South Korean firm that tracks users satisfaction rankings across a variety of factors, compared Apple's iPhone 5s against Samsung's latest Galaxy S5, LG G Pro2, Nexus 5 and other models. While Apple overall was significantly above average across every category, Samsung was ranked below average in design, display, processing speed, multimedia speed, size and weight, usability, response to touch, latest tech and UI design.

Samsung's new Galaxy S5 flagship was ranked below iPhone 5s across the board, but it also came in below average in comparison to other Android products in terms of design, and ended up in sixth place overall, behind 2012's iPhone 5, the last two generations of LG's G2 flagship and the Google-branded Nexus 5, which is also built by LG.

The survey involved 9,397 consumers who purchased a smartphone during the 6 months between October 2013 and April 2014. "The gap of satisfaction between Apple and domestic products has rather increased," noted a report by the Korean language Ohmy News.

"The satisfaction score of Apple products was 798 out of 1000," the site noted, "which made Apple take the first place with almost 200 points of gap between domestic products. LG, Samsung and Pantech had gained 609, 600, and 577 respectively, which are of more or less the same score."

The survey noted that nearly 90 percent of iPhone users reported being "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their purchase, while only about 50 percent of domestic makers got a similar ranking.

The site quoted Marketing Insight as observing, "Considering that the products satisfaction usually decreases as the longer time has based since the product released, the score of iPhone 5s is amazing."

The report further noted, "Galaxy S5 obtained a humiliating result as it failed to get ahead of LG G Pro2 in any sector in the comparison between the representative models of Samsung and LG, released this year."

Samsung recently sacked its head of mobile design in the wake of the Galaxy S5's cool reception. The company took great pains to cherry pick lines from lines from lackluster reviews for its latest ad, and failed to impress users with a company blog posting describing the phone's inspiration. "We're winning with our products in all the ways that are most important to us: in customer satisfaction, in product usage and in customer loyalty" Tim Cook

Apple takes great pride in reporting awards for customer satisfaction, including its first place standings in the latests American rankings by J.D. Power and Associates, which listed iPhone as the top smartphone on all four top U.S. carriers and iPad highest in overall consumer satisfaction for tablets.