Quarter of iPhones fail within two years

At least a quarter of iPhones fail within the first two years of use, according to figures released by independent warranty provider SquareTrade.

The figures are based on an analysis of over 25,000 iPhones covered by the company's care plans, and reveal that 25.6 percent failed in under two years.

A breakdown of the figures shows that the majority of failures were the result of accidents, typically a cracked screen owing to the device being dropped, while 7.5 percent suffered a hardware malfunction.

While a 25 percent failure rate seems steep, SquareTrade's report said that this figure is significantly lower than a year ago, when a study found an expected failure rate of 33 percent over two years.

Paradoxically, the report concludes that Apple has "created one of the most reliable smartphones on the market", yet SquareTrade offers no figures on failure rates for other handsets to back this up.

The company had not responded to our requests for further information at the time of writing.

However, a SquareTrade report from 2008 found that iPhone users reported a malfunction rate of 5.6 percent during the first year, compared with 14.3 percent for BlackBerry users and 21 percent for Palm Treo users.