Which Magazine have published a report which shows that one in seven mobile phones goes wrong within a year in the UK and 70% of the faults occurred in the first six months.
Video phone operator 3 had the poorest record, with one in three handsets on its network having problems in the first 12 months.
Fault reports within a year of purchase:
- 3 – 32%
- Orange – 16%
- T-Mobile – 15%
- Vodafone – 15%
- BT Mobile – 14%
- 02 – 13%
- Virgin – 8%
- Tesco – 4%
Source: Which? survey
In fairness to 3 – they are the only company focussed almost exclusively on 3g networks and some of this has to be due to the newness of the technology both on the network end and the handsets.
Interestingly, there were marked differences between the handset manufacturers as well:
Motorola and Sony Ericsson handsets were the most likely to go wrong; about a fifth of owners reported faults.
Nokia and Samsung were the most reliable, although about one in ten users still had faulty phones.
A one in seven chance your shiny new mobile will fail? I know I’d be fuming if it was my phone!
I’m not surprised by the figures at all, I work in the business and see what goes on during the development of handsets. More and more phones are now being built in low cost countries China, that’ll hardly help the situation.