Study Finds iPhone Twice As Reliable As BlackBerry

An anonymous reader writes "As reported at TechCrunch, 'The iPhone is twice as reliable as the BlackBerry after one year of ownership, a new study by SquareTrade finds. SquareTrade, which sells extra warranties for cell phones and other devices, looked at the failure rates of 15,000 phones covered under its plans. The malfunction rate for iPhones after one year is 5.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent for the BlackBerry and 16.2 percent for the Treo.' The full report (pdf) can be found at the SquareTrade site."

Who protects a Blackberry?

[NevDull]

I have and carry both a Blackberry for work, and an iPhone because I wanted something that wasn't under the control of IT overlords. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who carries a Blackberry in the default plastic holster and drops it onto the floor at least once every few weeks... and it's got nothing to protect it from that dive. My iPhone, however, being my personal property, does get better care. It's usually in a case in a pocket, and only small portions of its surface are directly exposed... I'm not surprised that iPhones fail less. People take far better care of them.

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[Ethanol-fueled]

In the first TFA the failures are seperated by like components/subsystems. The logically strange thing is that the catagory with the highest failure rate across all 3 brands is "screen/keypad/touchpad". I'd wait a couple more years for more reliable iPhone faulure data to be gathered, it's hard to compare one inoperable button with an erratic touchscreen(don't know about the treo, but iPhone alphanumerics must be entered with the touchscreen as opposed to the crackberry's button-keypad.

Not terribly surprising

[Ira Sponsible]

I'm not surprised at all to see the Treo come in behind the BlackBerry and iPhone. As dearly as I loved my Treos, I went through four of them in a two year span. First was a dead screen, second was a defective screen, next one was dropped in a bucket of water (can't blame that one on the manufacturer), and the last one had a fatal battery/power problem. Even so, I'd prefer any treo from the 600 up over any BlackBerry on the market, but the iPhone gives it serious competition except for openness and wide availability of free/open applications available for the palm platform. I'll seriously consider Android based phones on that basis alone. I expect to see a metric crapton of apps show up for Android in a year or so, without having to worry about Apple deciding I shouldn't have certain apps. Stupid Palm could have so owned this market if they had bothered to develop their OS to keep up with current technology. I'll just keep using my obsolete Palms until they, too, die, but I'm not looking at anything new from the company. Looks like Android and iPhone are my upgrade options when the time comes for me to choose a new smartphone.

Re:Or??

[c_forq]

I actually think a major factor would be fewer points of failure. You have 3 buttons, one switch, the screen, the case, the chip and the battery. I would imagine the failure rate of highly used keyboard buttons on the blackberry would be much higher than the touchscreen.

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[renegadesx]

With 3G Smartphones being so commonplace these days is Blackberry even relevent anymore?

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[syousef]

Not to mention that most Blackberry users have devices paid for by their employer. The majority of iPhone users buy their own phones.

Regardless of who bought it, which would you spend more time protecting? Your personal entertainment device that lets you listen to music etc. or the virtual servant bell which forces you to check your email regularly out of hours and which few people use for personal calls.

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? iPhone, Windows Mobile, and PalmOS are the only real smartphone platforms. Android may yet prove itself, but Blackberry has the worst development tools and developer community there is. It's big expensive enterprise apps and 1 billion different Solitaire games for $19.99 each.

The iPhone on the other hand, while it has those billions of redundant solitaire games: they're free, and otherwise has an ever improving mixture of enterprise type, reasonably priced, and free apps of all types. Oh, and Apple lets you write native code with the same APIs they use, rather than forcing you to use Java.

I'm still skeptical about Android for the same reason, Java-only for 3rd party development. Since it's open source someone could technically "fork" it to a platform that allows native coding, but that'd be it's own thing and not have the industry backing. So far "just fork it" hasn't worked in creating a mass market force for OSS systems on the workstations, and it won't be any different on smartphones.

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[daBass]

While no denying your comment, I doubt many companies like yours would be using extra warranty services like this. I am sure SquareTrade's statistics only includes those insured by them - most likely individuals and small businesses.

So the abuse by enterprise users likely does not come into these figures.

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[popo]

"an iPhone user is more than twice as likely to experience an iPhone failure due to accidental damage than through a handset malfunction."

Because when you drop the Blackberry your company bought for you, you claim it "just broke". When you drop the iPhone you paid for yourself, you're comfortable admitting that you dropped it.

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[More_Cowbell]

... well, anything that can't be fixed by the user.

Just out of curiosity what exactly would you call a user fixable part on a cell phone?
Aside from the few phones that have interchangeable outer covers, I can't think of a single thing. Not like they sell parts at Radio Shack...

Not necessarily true

[Cyberllama]

If you don't have an AT&T contract, you cannot get your iphone serviced. With that in mind, I'm sure many minor issues aren't sent in for repair and people simply learn to live with them.

For instance, my iPhone has, ever since I got it, had one dead speaker (the left one). But because I've been using prepaid sim card (AT&T) and I used a jail breaking program to activate my phone, Apple won't do anything for me about it. So, as far as they are concerned, my phone is working great. It's not a huge deal so I don't worry about it.

They don't specifically say you must have an AT&T contract to get warranty service, but it's more or less required via the other terms. They wont' service your phone unless its activated ("How can we see if it's working or not?). They won't service phones that aren't activated legitimately (at least not if they know about it). You MUST sign up for a contract to activate your phone (not actually true with the 3g, it'll apparently activate on a prepaid sim).

Re:Not necessarily true

[nathana]

Oh, good grief; not you, too?

Neither iPhone model has stereo speakers. It's not a dead speaker, it's the fricking MICROPHONE [macrumors.com].

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[renegadesx]

I think its funny that I got modded flamebait despite it was a legit question! I could see how it could be interpreted as a troll but flamebait?

It's just I have found Blackberry to be a pain to maintain and just really expensive. Eventually we just went made do with Exchange, for push email in Exchange/Outlook mobile, that can be done (I dont know about Groupwise) and we were already paying for exchange to begin with. We just felt that was good enough so we phased out Blackberry and got everyone O2's, this was about 05 when smartphones were just starting to come out in the mainstream so the end users loved it (except the first model O2 XDA Atom's caused headaches) If you are paranoid with IT security and/or are a Notes shop I can see your point but for 90% of the market I would consider an Exchange shop to be "good enough".

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[PCM2]

Regardless of who bought it, which would you spend more time protecting? Your personal entertainment device that lets you listen to music etc. or the virtual servant bell which forces you to check your email regularly out of hours and which few people use for personal calls.

In all fairness, modern BlackBerry handsets do audio and video. Mine even has a 3.5mm headphone jack. Many also come equipped with cameras (although people who need to go places that don't allow cameras can get ones without). It's also good for surfing the Web, and although it comes equipped with a pretty decent mapping application, Google Maps is even better. As for personal calls, well, I really just don't enjoy being on the phone that much. But if I was somewhere away from home and I needed to make a phone call, I imagine pulling my BlackBerry out of my pocket, dialing a number, and holding it to my ear would be the simplest way to do it. Why wouldn't I?

What's more, all modern BlackBerry handsets have an Auto On/Off feature. If you're really so concerned, have it switch itself off at 6pm and come back on in the morning.

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[Anonymous Coward]

"iPhone integrates w/Exchange without requiring you to license/maintain this component" ...and as such you don't reap the benefits that the enterprise server gives you such as end to end encryption and content compression.

The GP is right. iPhone does email in the most basic sense of the word, but when it comes to enterprise class email, RIM is the only game in town by a large margin.

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[Anonymous Coward]

My iPhone has been through more abuse than any other phone I've had. Primarily because I bought one of those velcro closing cases and the velcro went bad - it fell in the street 3 times while I was jogging across, and took a 2 story fall onto concrete on an outside terrace while I was running up the stairs.

The aluminum case has some nasty scars in it, and the screen has a scratch near the speaker, but that's it. It's really not as fragile as I would have thought.

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[drinkypoo]

I keep hearing about how our auto industry is in the toilet and they need a quarter-trillion dollar loan from the government (us) to keep going and I wonder if there aren't some entrepreneurs out there who could build reasonably priced, well-built cars that were really efficient and looked cool and who could become the next "Big Three". This won't happen, of course, because of the belief that GM, Ford, etc must be helped because they are "too big to let fail".

And by helped you must mean "granted a virtual monopoly on auto production in the US". Or at least a piece thereof.

Whenever I hear that some corporation or bank is "too big to fail" I always think that means they are "too big to exist".

A situation like that is like going to war - by the time you're fighting, you have already failed. Allowing a corporation to get so big means that We The People have FAILED in our jobs as citizens. Myself included.

Our government "of the people" helped the big three automakers destroy the working public transportations which predated our all-auto culture. We are all complicit - we let it happen in the name of "personal freedom". Every state in the union has laws to allow it to take your car away on basically any pretext, even if you weren't driving it at the time. So much for freedom.

re: salaried work

[King_TJ]

I'd argue that you're absolutely wrong. Paying someone a salary, vs. an hourly wage means there's an understanding that neither party thinks it necessary to track every minute that you're working. The employer benefits because he/she gains flexibility. (EG. You might be asked to stay late when a new piece of software is rolled out, and part of the setup can't even be done while the 9-5 employees are around and using the app.) The employee benefits because he/she is freed from a degree of micro-management. (EG. No more getting "write ups" and "warnings" just because a traffic accident or snowstorm caused you to get in 3 minutes late. No big problems if you wind up taking an extra long lunch break when you meet up with some friends you rarely see.)

It's sort of a "gentleman's agreement", not written anyplace, but understood. If either employer or employee abuses it too much, then it creates problems, and the other party is going to consider terminating the employment contract.

Salary was never a written agreement to become a corporate servant.

Re:OMGITSSOOOOOSHINY

[binaryspiral]

We had this same problem at the college I work at until the IT department changed up the way we handled this. Now if they "break" a phone we charge the department for phone replacements. You'd be surprised at how few managers of departments are willing to slice $200 off their budget to get a new shiny phone. Or if they do - I don't care, because it doesn't set any of my projects behind any longer.

Also, we initiated a two year rotation on phones - everyone gets a new one (the same model as the deans and executives) every two years. That cut down on the envy-breakage considerably.

Your tax payer dollars hard at work...