All I can tell you is that nurabers don't lie. Here in Rochester, NY, the whole market had a unusually high amount of problems with this phone--all related to charger problems and screens going dead. Hell, it wasn't unusual at all for my employees to find them DOA right outta the box. The management at Cricket (from Regional VP down to the Operations Manager) all said that this phone was nothing but problems. I highly doubt your facts above about failure rate being the lowest, considering that Cricket just lowered the insurance deductible to only $35 on the Starcomm 8615 & the new Starcomm 7026. This has to be some sort of deal between Cricket & Starcomm in order to keep the customers happy. UT Starcomm sucks--period!