As universities gradually embrace on mobile learning, smartphone usage among undergraduate students in Nigeria has rapidly increased. Smartphones are now used by students for accessing academic information, entering school media sites and performing other academic activities. In this study, a survey on reliability of five different brands of smartphones among undergraduate students of Federal University of Technology, Akure was carried out using well-structured survey questionnaires to gather primary data for the study. Cronbach’s Alpha test was used to validate the acceptable reliability of the survey questionnaire at various level of significance α while Kruskal – Wallis’s test was used to test if there was a significant difference in the reliability of these brands of smartphones usage among undergraduate students. In addition, exponential distribution was applied to determine mean time between failure, failure rate, failure density function, and reliability function respectively. Results of the study showed that reliability of smartphones among undergraduates is dependent on the smartphone brand. In particular, it also shows that Samsung smartphone brand is most reliable among the sampled undergraduate smartphone users compared with the other brands since it has the least failure rate and greatest reliability function values within the period of 3 years of purchase considered.
Key words: Reliability function, smartphone brands, Cronbach’s Alpha test, failure rate
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