A year-long study of 600,000 support calls has found that Android phones are more susceptible to hardware faults than other types of devices.

A nearly year-long study of 600,000 support calls has found that Android phones are more susceptible to hardware faults than other types of devices.

The study, conducted by WDS, found that 14 percent of all technical support calls for Android devices could be traced to a hardware fault, versus 3.7 percent for RIM BlackBerry, 8 percent for iPhones and 9 percent for Windows Phone 7 devices.

WDS did not disclose how many support calls in general technicians fielded for each platform. The study covered 600,000 support calls from June 2010 to May 2011 and covered Europe, North America, South Africa and Australia.

Tim Deluca-Smith, the vice president of marketing for WDS, said that the overall percentages of support calls by platform were difficult to measure. The company refers to those as the "propensity to call," the percentage of devices that would display a problem in any given batch over a 12-month period.

"In this study we have not been able to measure PTC for two reasons," Deluca-Smith said via email. "We would require shipment volumes from all of the carriers/OEMs that were part of the 600,000 calls sampled. Many do not share this information with us. [Second,] We sample only calls we take at our contact centers (principally based in the U.S. and Europe); end-users may have visited their carrier's Web care to resolve an issue. In which case, there was still a problem  but we didn't get to see it."

"In this study, we were only able to use transactions in our direct control and split out hardware failures as part of that," Deluca-Smith added.

WDS attributed the gap in hardware faults to the disparity in OEMs that manufacture Android devices, 35 in all. Android is licensed to OEMs under an open-source license. Microsoft also licenses its Windows Phone OS to other OEMs, while Apple and RIM build their own phones.

"Android has been instrumental in bringing smartphone technology into the mass-market. The maturation of the industry, availability of hardware components and a reduction in manufacturing costs has seen some OEMs drop the price of Android smartphones below US$100," Craig Rich, chief marketing officer at WDS, said in a statement. "However, many of these factors are also driving varying levels of hardware quality into the market, in turn delivering an inconsistent customer experience."

Not surprisingly, the Android faults were more common on certain undisclosed brands, WDS found. Common faults included keypad/button failures and microphone and battery issues, the firm said.

The WDS findings are probably good news for Microsoft, assuming . Android will continue its climb toward mobile operating system dominance, capturing about 40 percent of the market in the second half of 2011. Windows Phone 7, meanwhile, will benefit from Microsoft's , and capture the number-two spot, as well as 20 percent market share, by 2015, IDC said.

PCMag.com reporting has also found that both , as the line between home and the workplace continues to blur.

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 11:57 AM PT with additional comments by Deluca-Smith.