iPhone trounces BlackBerry, Treo in reliability
By Simon Sage on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 7:19 AM PST In BlackBerry, Palm, Research, iPhone
Man, not only is the iPhone beating BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) in sales and customer satisfaction, but the latest study from SquareTrade is showing that BlackBerrys malfunction about twice as much as an iPhone. Ouch. The survey gathered results from 15,000 handsets over the course of a year, which showed that 11.2% of BlackBerrys covered under SquareTrade’s warranties reported malfunctions, while a whopping 16.2% of Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Treos had done the same, but only 5.6% of iPhone reported damage in the same period, mostly touchscreen-related and due to accidental damage.
While that might sound bad for BlackBerry, in the grand scheme of things, a 6% difference isn’t that much of gap between the two. I might be a bit biased, but I would hardly call my Bold unreliable. However, the survey does provide a lot of comparative perspective, and certainly justifies in one way why sales and customer satisfaction are higher among iPhone users; the smartphone feature sets may be comparable across the board, but how well those functions continue to work over the long haul could be the deciding differentiator.
[via MobileCrunch]
If this is 12 month data its entirely skewed. Most iPhones in the wild are the older EDGE v1 iphones, not the 3G. The 3G isnt old enough to have 12 month historical return rate data yet.
I had to replace my blackberry 8820 over the weekend with a Bold 9000 due to a damaged USB connector so it wasnt taking a charge. The device was just over a year old, which given the fact it was under such heavy use and I abuse the hell out of it does not surprise me.
The AT&T store manager at a suburban NYC metro area store told me the return rates on the iphone 3G are significantly higher than the original iphone. At least 4 people were in the store complaining about various malfunctions when I was there, and were SOL and told to return them to the Apple store or call apple.
There are more BB models, more units in the wild, units clocked more hours in operation, not to mention corporate devices are more heavily used and abused than some personal toy you purcharsed with your own money. So, this “report” should be classified as BULL$HIT.