A study conducted by a mobile-phone warranty firm revealed that Apple’s iPhone has substantially less failures as compared to the failure rate of handsets from BlackBerry and Palm.

The SquareTrade study covered cell phone failure rates from over 15,000 new phones within a period of 12 months.

The team found that iPhones had a malfunction rate of 5.6 percent, as against 11.9 percent for BlackBerry smartphones.

Palm’s Treos range suffered the worst, with a failure rate of 16.2 percent during the same period.

The study also noticed that the major issues with iPhone linked to their touchscreens that accounted for a third of all reported problems with the phone.

However, 12 percent of iPhone users said that accidental damage cost of the phone is higher than other rival handsets, while the average for other handsets is 9 percent.

The authors wrote, “It’s likely that any iPhone owner can guess the reason iPhone accidents are so common.”

“After two minutes of handling an iPhone, it's impossible to escape noticing that the handsets are incredibly slippery. The form doesn't help, either. The dimensions make for a difficult grip, especially for those with small hands. These two factors conspire to make the iPhone more accident prone than just about any other handset model we've seen,” they added.

It was said that the battery failure was worse on BlackBerry and Palm than the iPhone, seems like iPhone is doing ok.

SquareTrade’s study did not consider software problems handled directly by the retailer or fixed by firmware updates.