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.

Soon the fans and admirers of Palm’s Treo brand of smartphones could avail the new and exciting model-the Treo Pro. Wednesday saw the company making the announcement that it would start selling a sleeker and even more elegant version of Treo, which was once really popular. The price of this latest version would be $549 in US.

The customers can relax as they will not have to sign any contract that means that users could choose between AT&T or T-Mobile’s G.S.M networks and switch whenever they feel like.

Palm accidentally leaked information about its new handset, Plam Treo 850, also called Treo Pro on its website. It is thought to be the best looking set from Palm and would operate on Windows Mobile instead of Palm’s long-awaited Nova operating system.

The leak, which happened in the form of flash presentation on the company’s website revealed that the set will be slimmer than its initial ancestors and would run on Windows Mobile 6.1 over 3G.

If you are in a business and had been planning to buy a smart phone for yourself, then there’s good news for you.