I rarely buy extended warranties. Mostly I’ve found them to be full of exclusions and loopholes that the provider uses to keep from paying off. So I was a little surprised to be having a conversation last week with my college roommate about extended warranties. He’s a heavy eBay seller and buyer and someone that I expected would avoid the extra expense of warranties like the plague. He told me that he generally does avoid them - except for one warranty provider. Plus he had a secret tip for me that I’ll use to enroll most of my gadgets at a big savings.

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According to a study of over 15,000 Palm, RIM and iPhone devices by Square Trade (link to PDF copy of study) the iPhone was least likely to have a hardware failure. While this may be surprising to some, the iPhone’s first year failure rate according to the study was 5.6% while the Research In Motion BlackBerry devices reached up to 11.9% and Palm topped out at 16.2%. The study primarily focussed on hardware issues didn’t take into account problems fixed by software patches or firmware updates. The most problematic area? Touchpad/Screen/Keypad.

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