Comment And the article misses the point. (Score 1) 357
After reading the article (and at times, it seems that the article is biased one way or the other. A rather interesting read from a technical stand-point). It is in no way commenting on the quality of the Android System or is it truly comparing Android vs Blackberry vs iOS vs Windows 7 (yeah, they list Windows 7 in the research, but it didn't make it to the writers page... Interesting).
The point and reason for the research was to analyze and report on Android as a platform and a supportable system. It identifies key characteristics in the serviceability of the Android (using other systems as a point of reference), and while they believe that the fragmentation (which they believe is the reason for the fact that 14% of all Android calls are hardware vs 7% and 6% of iOS and Blackberry), that factor does not outweigh the positive that such a model brings (pretty much the first paragraph in the report's summary).
Needless to say, with WDS posting it with such a poorly worded title, and the ability for other reviewers to lazily recap the title, and lead-in to the report (ok, they have 1 paragraph to represent a 17 page document, of which they selected to partially represent the hardware fault outline... Partially).
There are also several mis-quotes in the article that are rather telling.
e.g.:
WDS noted in its report. “Deployment by more than 25 OEMs and lower-cost product coming to market is leading to higher than average rates of hardware failures and, in turn, return and repair costs.”
Actual report text (page 4): "Its use exploded and today the OS is deployed by more than 35 OEMs2 , offering an
accessible and customizable platform that has resonated with manufacturers and mobile operators alike."
-- These stats are not even in the report. There is a graph that represents amounts per type of issue, but they do not give hard numbers in the report and w/o the graph, you do not see that the stats are fairly balanced between device with each device having a specific high fault area, except android.
12.6% of all technical support calls related to Android in the study were for hardware failures related to the touchscreen, buttons, speakers, microphones and battery performance. Just 9.3% of Windows Phone, 8% of iOS calls and 5.5% of BlackBerry calls were related to hardware failures.
--
Actual report text (): "While Android deployments may show a higher propensity to hardware failures than rival OS platforms,
analysis of these hardware faults shows no principle defects on the platform; ie: the platform is not
predisposed to one particular hardware defect. Instead, the distribution of hardware faults against
weighted averages deviates by less than 1% in all categories. In this instance, Android actually benefits
from deployment across multiple reference designs and component variants. This means that the brand is
unlikely to be associated with a specific hardware shortcoming."
===
The rest of the article goes on to only quote the press release.
At least that's the way it looks to me...