Apple's iPhone has half the failure rate of RIM's BlackBerry in the first year of use, a study carried out by a mobile-phone warranty firm has found.
The SquareTrade study, released on Saturday, looked at more than 15,000 handsets that were covered by the company's policies. It found iPhones had a malfunction rate of 5.6 percent in the first year, compared to 11.9 percent for BlackBerry smartphones. Palm's Treos fared even worse, with 16.2 percent having some sort of malfunction in the first 12 months of use.
Figures from the analyst firm Canalysys, released last week, showed Apple has now overtaken RIM in the global smartphone sales stakes.
SquareTrade had to project their figures for the iPhone's failure rate over a two-year period, as the handset has not been available for that long — nonetheless, that rate came in at between nine to 11 percent. The equivalent failure rate for BlackBerry handsets was 14.3 percent, with the Treo coming in at 21 percent.
Breaking the figures down, the most prominent malfunctions for iPhone users appear to be touchscreen-related, accounting for a third of all reported issues with that handset. However, 12 percent of iPhone users reported accidental damage to their handsets within the first year of use — the average for other handsets is nine percent.
"It's likely that any iPhone owner can guess the reason iPhone accidents are so common," the authors wrote. "After two minutes of handling an iPhone, it's impossible to escape noticing that the handsets are incredibly slippery. The form doesn't help, either. The dimensions make for a difficult grip, especially for those with small hands. These two factors conspire to make the iPhone more accident prone than just about any other handset model we've seen."
The report's authors also noted that fewer than half-a-percent of iPhone owners reported battery problems after a year of use, compared with around one percent for BlackBerry and Treo users.
SquareTrade's study did not take into account software issues handled directly by the retailer or fixed by firmware updates.
ZDNet UK has requested comment on SquareTrade's report from both RIM and Apple, but had not received it at the time of writing.
Talkback
am I the only person who finds the stats in this report confusing - the first paragraph states double the level of failure rates for Blackberry devices (5.9% vs 11%) but then in para 3 the failure rates quoted are different.
In anycase - the headline suggests the Blackberries have had more problems but then does details the specific problem areas - talking more about the iPhone - very confusing...
Also the link to the squaretrade pdf is broken so I was unable to read the detail behind the report.
It is potentially a very interesting stat - given Blackberry's dominance in the business market... the heritage of their devices is mobile email that works..
Hi James - thanks for the comments. First off, not sure what you mean about the link - it's working for me. Re the failure rates quoted in the third/fourth paragraph, those are failure rates over a 2-year period, rather than the 1-year period referenced in the headline and first paragraph.
Regarding the focus on the iPhone in the body of the text - that's because the iPhone is still more of an unknown quantity than the BlackBerry, which has been around for years in one form or another. Therefore, I thought it more interesting to look at the quantitative data on iPhone malfunctions or otherwise, as it's not something that's often enough gone out of the realms of anecdote.
So, SquareTrade is comparing the failure rate of a single phone to the failure rate of all Blackberry Phones combined - 16 different phones currently listed on their site. Anyone else see a problem with this comparison?
Because we don't have the individual Blackberry numbers, we'll have to average here...
12% failure rate / 16 phones = 1.3% failure rate per phone.
Seems to me the iPhone failure rate at 6% is a lot higher than the average 1.3% failure rate of the Blackberry phones.
Want to try that article again David?
There is a high-level point to be made here: because all BlackBerry failures are lumped together, it could be that there is one bad "apple" in the bunch---a BlackBerry model that has very high failure rates and therefore accounts for a disproportionate number of the total BlackBerry failures. However, your math is *completely* wrong. The failure rate is calculated as follows:
failure rate = total failures across all models / total number of phones
So let's say for the sake of argument you were right, and the failure rate per model was 1.3%. Furthermore, let's assume we saw 1000 phones for each of the 16 models, meaning for each model, 1.3% x 1000 phones = 13 phones failed. What would the total failure rate be?
failure rate = total failures / total number of phones
= (16*13)/(16*1000)
= 13/1000
= 1.3%
If the average failure rate for each model is X%, then the average failure rate across all models is also X% and vice versa.
Even though the formula is meaningless, I'll also note that 12% failure rate / 16 phones = 0.75%.