Tag: mobile devices

A list of the “Most Breakable Gadgets” has now been released to show that some of the priciest break the most easily.

An insurance company has now released a list of mobile devices that they feel are the most fragile based on their own testing and data, and what they have found is that the Apple iPad Mini and the Samsung Galaxy S4 are among those that are the easiest to break.

Following some research, the firm came to the conclusion that durability is not Apple’s strong suit.

This is one area where those mobile devices were decidedly not superior to some of the competing brands such as the Google Nexus, Samsung, or Motorola gadgets. That said, even though the iPad Mini was the mobile gadget that was the most breakable, the Samsung Galaxy S4 was a close second, so it shouldn’t be too keen to rub it in, quite yet.

The tests were conducted by SquareTrade Europe to test the durability of top mobile devices.

The research was held based on certain common scenarios that could be experienced by these gadgets throughout their lifetimes. For example, they were dropped onto a concrete floor from a predetermined height, and were dunked into water. According to the SquareTrade managing director, Kevin Gillan, explained that consumers are pouring an increasing amount of money into their portable tech, so it is important to know that the device will be able to hold up to the purchaser’s life, to “get our money’s worth”.

Gillan added that “By putting devices through tests that replicate real life situations, we want to help people make smart choices when it comes to choosing gadgets and ensure they are covered against accidental damage.”

The SquareTrade Most Breakable Gadgets top 10 list actually included four products from Apple, including the iPad Mini at the top of the list, as well as the iPad Air (in third place), the iPhone 5C (in fifth place) and the iPhone 5S (in eighth place). Top competitor, Samsung, had three devices of its own on the list, including the Galaxy S4 (in second place), the Galaxy S3 (in fourth place) and the Galaxy Tab 3 (in seventh place).

To complete this list of fragile mobile devices was the Google Nexus 7 (in sixth place), the Google Nexus 7 2013 (in ninth place), and the Motorola Moto X (in tenth place).

Two major players in smartphone transactions have teamed up to boost the market – MasterCard and Weve.

MasterCard and Weve have now come together in a partnership that is designed to help the mobile payments market to clean itself up, smooth itself out and become considerably more appealing to merchants and consumers alike.

The scattered and inconsistent nature of the market is a major factor that is holding back the adoption of the tech.

This new mobile payments partnership is made up of credit card giant, MasterCard, and Weve, which is a joint venture comprising of the three largest mobile operators in the United Kingdom: O2, Vodafone UK, and EE. They will be working together to develop something altogether new and that will hopefully do what the market has failed to be able to provide until now.

They have described their goal of creating the U.K.’s “most comprehensive contactless mobile payments system.”

This is meant to help to create a contactless system for paying for products and services through the use of their smartphones and mobile devices, in a way that will be simple and convenient for consumers to use, while being cheaper to manage for banks. The role that MasterCard has taken on is to provide the system with the integration services and the technology to make it possible for financial institutions such as banks to be able to step into the payment platform from Weve.

Weve’s CEO, David Sear, said that this contactless transaction technology in the form of credit and debit cards has been taking off in the United Kingdom. He explained that there are currently 36 million people in the U.K. who are using this type of card, and that more than 300,000 retailers there are able to process this type of transaction.

Equally, he admits that paying over mobile devices using similar technology is “a bit of a mess”. He stated that it “may sound harsh, but it’s inescapably true; to date, the industry has created a level of discussion and confusion driven by a multitude of announcements that actually haven’t delivered mobile payments systems that works the way that consumers want and need them to.”