iPhone edges out Android smartphones in reliability race

Life

Apple’s iPhone remains the most reliable smartphone, edging out hard-charging Android-based handsets made by Motorola and HTC, acccording to a US provider of after-sale warranties.

SquareTrade estimated that the iPhone 4’s malfunction rate over a 12-month span was just 2.1%, meaning that slightly more than two phones out of every 100 will die during a year.

Motorola’s Android smartphones were projected to fail at an estimated rate of 2.3%, while 3.7% of HTC’s Android devices tend to give up the ghost in a 12-month stretch.

SquareTrade pegged the older iPhone 3GS’ failure rate at 2.3%, the same as Motorola’s handsets.

“The iPhone is still the most reliable smartphone around,” said Vince Tseng, SquareTrade’s director of marketing.

To come to that conclusion, SquareTrade analysed four months of iPhone 4 warranty claims, eights months of Motorola and HTC data, then graphed a 12-month failure rate for all manufacturers based on the real-world curve for all smartphones.

SquareTrade also mined its claim data for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, and found that the company’s hardware failed at a 6.3% annual rate, triple that of the iPhone 4 and almost double that of HTC.

All failure rates excluded claims for accidental damage, such as shattered screens caused by dropping a smartphone.

But what grabbed Tseng’s attention was the major improvement in reliability since SquareTrade last examined its claim data in November 2008.

Then, BlackBerrys failed at a whopping 11.9% rate in each 12-month span, while 5.6% of Apple’s iPhone 3G phones – its newest at the time – failed in the same period.

That means Apple improved its failure rate by 62% in the last two years, Tseng said, while RIM cut its dead-smartphone rate by 47%.

Tseng called the Apple and RIM improvements “pretty impressive.”

When SquareTrade combined malfunction and accident rates, the field was much more level, the company said in the survey results, which were released today. The iPhone 4’s total claim rate was 14.9% – identical to HTC’s but slightly higher than the 14.6% of Motorola.

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