Apple sure is taking the high road with the success of the iPhone. Once again Apple has beaten RIM and their Blackberry line in terms of reliability.  Apple has managed to come out on top with two models when RIM has an entire collection of handsets.

In a study done by SquareTrade, out of 15,000 iPhone handsets, only 5.6 percent failed in the first year of use. Blackberry handsets failed 11.9 percent within the first year.  Palm came in third with 16.2 percent failing in a 12-month period. Battery failure was also a lot better in the iPhone than in Blackberry and Palm handsets.

A third of the cause for failure came back to the touch screen.  Another issue reported was the shape of the actual device, even though it is pretty thin, the phone seems a little wide causing people to drop it. “One year in, the data suggests that Apple’s first foray into the cell phone handset market has not been plagued by hardware problems, as some early reports suggested,” concluded the study. “Aside from exhibiting a relatively high rate of touchscreen failures, iPhones have not had significantly high malfunction rates in any of the areas we identified.”

[Via SquareTrade]