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Report: Mobile Device Choices Can Impact Business Costs, Productivity

The surveyΒ indicated that non-rugged devices have triple the failure rate.

A report commissioned by Japanese electronics giant Kyocera found that durable mobile devices were both less costly and significantly less likely to fail.

Kyocera β€” which includes "rugged" devices among its smartphone offerings β€” tabbed VDC Research to conduct a poll of more than 200 IT executives throughout the manufacturing, transportation, health care and hospitality industries.

Read more: Top manufacturing technology trends for 2015 and beyond.

The survey, the company said, indicated that non-rugged devices fail at a rate three times that of their rugged counterparts, and that each device failure can result in more than three hours of lost productivity alone.

Rugged devices also showed an average total ownership cost 46 percent lower than other devices.

"Many consumer devices aren’t designed for use in business environments and the hardware is failing," said Kyocera Communications' Eric Heiser. "In fact, it isn’t uncommon for companies to report failure rates in excess of 50 percent."

Kyocera expects frontline workers to use nearly 100 million mobile devices this year.

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