Patience No Virtue Among Consumers Coping With ‘Faulty’ Smartphones, Study Finds

Patience is no virtue among consumers coping with “faulty” smartphones or lousy customer care at their wireless carriers, found a Blancco Technology Group study. Blancco canvassed 1,400 smartphone-owning consumers aged 25-65 in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia in early June and found that the combination of defective phones and shoddy customer service would cause 31 percent of respondents to switch to different mobile carriers and another 33 percent to change their device manufacturers, the research firm said Wednesday in a report. Though only 2 percent of consumers surveyed said they’re “bothered” by inferior camera or video quality, 38 percent cited poor battery life as their most pressing smartphone gripe, the firm said. Faulty smartphone functionality “is the norm, not the exception,” the firm said. It said 31 percent of respondents typically experience problems with their devices at least once a month and as often as several times a year.