According to a recent research survey published by SquareTrade, a company that sells warranties for a wide range of products, Apple delivers the most reliable smartphones, while Android manufacturers like Motorola and HTC are not far behind.
Apparently, SquareTrade analyzed failure rates of over 50,000 smart phones covered by the company's Care Plans and found that Apple‘s
iPhones had the least malfunctions.
The reported malfunction rate after 12 months, puts Apple's iPhone 4 device in the “lead”, with only 2.1% of the owners reporting a malfunction, followed closely by iPhone 3GS and Motorola with 2.3%. HTC came next with a one-year rate of malfunction rate of 3.7% and Blackberry's 6.3%.
The results were based on the combination of both types of failure, accidents and normal malfunctions. SquareTrade examined the malfunction rate first, to compare the device's reliability of each manufacturer when an accident wasn't involved.
“Accidental damage is responsible for over 75% of smart phone failures.
BlackBerry devices had the lowest one-year accident rate at 6.7%, and the iPhone 4 had the highest at 9.4%.”
However, the company reported that it only received solid data concerning Motorola and HTC devices from the last 8 month, since Android started to bloom only in 2010.
Furthermore, SquareTrade stated that it has obtained solid data for Apple's iPhone 4 from the last 4 months, as the device was launched in June 2010.
Basically, the company used the solid data obtained and projected the result for the rest of the year. The actual 12 month data were only used for Blackberry, the iPhone
3GS and other smartphones, which came on last place with 6.7%.
As a side note, previous studies published in 2008 by SquareTrade have placed Blackberry's failure rate at 11.9% and iPhones at 5.6%.
That means both companies managed to improve their manufacturing techniques and dropped the malfunction rate by half or more, in only two years.
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