Smartphones Are Apparently Expensive to Insure

According to an article in a French newspaper, companies out there who specialize in insuring smartphones are starting to get worried as it is getting increasingly expensive to insure. Apparently for the iPhone, two thirds of the cost would come from broken units after they were dropped, and one third for stolen iPhones.

However they have come up with several adjustments which they hope will help to ease the cost of insuring smartphones.

• If the phone is broken, it will be replaced by an identical model instead of the new model to prevent waves of people breaking their phone when the new model comes out (where have I heard that one before!)
• Carriers will get tougher on stolen phones by doing everything possible to render then unusable.

As far as carriers getting involved and rendering the stolen phones unusable I find that hard to implement. Supposedly locked phones have managed to be unlocked and jailbroken so what’s to stop the thief from jailbreaking or selling it to someone who knows how to unlock the phone?

Apple could easily block the phone by blocking the UUID which would thus prevent any form of restoration, updates or app purchase but apparently this isn’t very high up on Apple’s list of things to do.