“Research in Motion’s ubiquitous BlackBerry smart phone had more than twice the rate of malfunctions in the first year of ownership compared with Apple Inc.’s iPhone,” Jeff Bounds reports for The San Francisco Business Times.
“That is according to a study by SquareTrade Inc., a San Francisco-based online retailer of extended warranties for electronics and appliances, of 15,000 phones produced by Cupertino-based Apple Inc., Research in Motion and Palm Inc.,” Bounds reports.
Bounds reports, “The study examined failure rates in iPhones, BlackBerrys and Treos covered by SquareTrade ‘care plans.’ It found the iPhone had a failure rate of 5.6 percent in its first year of ownership, compared with 11.9 percent for BlackBerrys and 16.2 percent for the Treo.”
“SquareTrade is an independent third party and has no affiliation with any of the handset manufacturers cited in the study,” Bounds reports.
Bounds reports, “Requests for comment from Research in Motion and Palm were not successful. In an e-mail, an Apple spokeswoman said the iPhone ‘ranked highest in overall customer satisfaction’ in a study by J.D. Power and Associates.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “J. H.” for the heads up.]
[UPDATE: 6:10pm ET: Changed headline from “Study: Apple iPhones more than twice as reliable as RIM BlackBerries, Palm Treos” as per comments below.]
The new Storm will even be worse. The huge gap surrounding that primitive all screen button is going to be a junk magnet. Its going to get mucked up quick, and no way for the user to clean what crud gets in there.
Didn’t we already see this ‘study’ a week or two ago?
New Storm will be a mess. I tried one out on Monday and it took 4 times for the sales guy to show me how the screen ‘flips’ to landscape before it actually did. The screen is very nice, but the RIM graphics for the buttons are absolutely terrible. OH ya, the sales guy also took a pair of tweezers out to ‘pick out” some fuzz that had gotten lodged between the screen and the side. He said it isn’t any big deal and it would work just fine even if the fuzz was there- but it looked nicer without the fuzz… Some sales pitch.
So is it ever possible we will have a Perfect Storm?
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This MAY also be because people who buy iPhones are buying themselves, but they are issued a blackberry/palm by their work, where they dont have to pay if it is broken. The private stuff they have to pay themselves.
Six percent of iPhones malfunction after a year? That’s rather shocking. Apple shouldn’t consider that acceptable, even if their competitors’ products are far worse.
-jcr
MDN, please run this story again for the third time next week and make sure to run it again the following week for the fourth time.
@Jon Bendtsen
They don’t have to pay to get iPhones fixed either. They’re under warrantee.
Must be a slow news week…<rolls eyes>
Jon Bendtsen: This MAY also be because people who buy iPhones are buying themselves, but they are issued a blackberry/palm by their work, where they dont have to pay if it is broken. The private stuff they have to pay themselves.
That should not be a factor in a survey done by an insurer as this one has been. If you’ve got insurance for a defect (extended warranty), you’ll most likely claim it regardless whether private or work.
Interesting, but I’d like to see the figures for 2 and 3 years of ownership as well (real figures, not “data projections”).
Nothing annoyed me more than when my previous phone (a V3 RAZR) failed to even last the length of the initial contract I signed up for with it.
The iPhone is the greatest device I have ever owned.
Seriously.
I drive around, I need to know something, boom, I know it.
It is a life changer.
My iPhone is a beast
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” /> I’ve dropped on asphalt, my two year old has slobbered all over it, and my four year old covered it in PB&J;, and it’s never had an issue. I use it nearly as much as my macbook.
The Treo has been the worst phone I’ve ever owned. I hope Palm dies a horrible death.
I don’t see how this makes the iPhone twice as reliable. Also what are the details of the study?
iPhone = 94.4% are fine in the first year
Blackberries = 88.1% are fine in the first year
gse: I don’t see how this makes the iPhone twice as reliable
Having only half the defects means it is.
I agree with gse in the post above. The percentage of reliable iPhones is 94.4 and the percentage of reliable Blackberrys is 88.1. The real math is that the iPhone is 6.3 percent more reliable.
It would be true to say that it has less than half the failure rate, but that’s not the same as ‘twice as reliable’.
Say the failure rate for iPhones was 1% and the failure rate for the Blackberry was 2% … would the iPhone still be ‘twice as reliable’?
To put it another way, the Blackberry is only 6.3 percent more likely to be fail than the iPhone because you have to consider that you are buying one from the total pool that includes both perfect and imperfect units.
The ‘reliability’ of the product should be based on the percentage of reliable units. So any comparison would have to compare that percentage, not the the other way around.
Maybe it seems like semantics, but isn’t accuracy the thing that MDN is always a stickler for?
OK, the iPhone is twice as trouble-free.
nanisani : Say the failure rate for iPhones was 1% and the failure rate for the Blackberry was 2% … would the iPhone still be ‘twice as reliable’?
That would indeed be one of the most intuitive and practical metrics for reliability.
One might choose to use different ones, but in actual practice I care a lot more about the number of failures than about the number of times a product actually works. The latter should not be rare enough to require an emphasis on it.
But maybe that’s exactly the kind of thinking RIM and the others apply there — it would explain a few things.
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So if the iPhone had a failure rate of .5% and the Blackberry had a failure rate of 1% the iPhone is still ‘twice as reliable’?
“ent from: ping
gse: I don’t see how this makes the iPhone twice as reliable
Having only half the defects means it is.”
That’s correct. It’s only about 1/16th more reliable.
“So if the iPhone had a failure rate of .5% and the Blackberry had a failure rate of 1% the iPhone is still ‘twice as reliable’?”
No, it’s then only 1/200th more reliable.
In either case it’s half as likely to fail, but as the posters rightly point out, it matters as to what that’s half of.
Most people would shy away from a device which failed 100% of the time in favor of one that only failed 50% of the time (not that either is good) but wouldn’t really notice the difference between on that worked 99.9% of the time and one that worked 99.95% of the time. But both have the same “twice as reliable” score in MDN’s eyes!