Sentosa? No.
My reading of wikipedia is, roughly speaking, that there is one pretty broad definition of ocean, whereby pretty much all salt water is included in one ocean or another. Within these oceans there are then various pieces of water that have their own names -- example, the Bay of Bengal is part of the Indian Ocean. But there is also a narrower definition, in which the oceans are basically all the unnamed left over bits.

Excuse me for having 2 goes in a row - but at least it's not a guess at the answer.
That was my understanding as well, but I hadn't really thought about the implications in that part of the world, if you're going to say that you go directly from the Indian to the Pacific ocean.

East Indian? No.

Australian? No.
Komodo? No.
Not sure why it is proving so hard to narrow this down, other than the fact that people are doing a fair amount of guessing of places that have already been ruled out, and people are jumping perhaps too soon to guessing particular places.

What you know: This is an inhabited non-volcanic tropical island, one of a group, smaller than the Isle of Arran, not recently in the news. Rock climbing occurs there, and it does not have significant amounts of water on it.

It is located in a named body of water that is typically understood to be in the Indian Ocean. (As long as we are taking the broad definition of ocean there is no ambiguity about which ocean it is in.)

It is not Sentosa, Réunion, Al Hallaniyah, Komodo, Java, one of the Maldives, or one of the Andaman and Nicobar islands. It is not in the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal. It is not African or Australasian, or in the East Indies. It is not a British Overseas Territory.

I will tell you for free that I think you are unlikely simply to guess it without more information. I don't expect everyone here to have heard of it (it may fail the Rosie test) but I would expect some or several people to have done so. It does have a couple of claims to fame. And there was a reason why I chose it as a subject; it's not just some random small island.

Inhabited by natives? I'd guess that most of the inhabitants are natives of the country of which this island is part, but very few would have been born on the island itself. There are also certainly some foreign residents, but I doubt if there are many scientists.
Name in English? Not exactly sure what you mean, but I think the best answer is No. (It can certainly be referred to using the English language, and in that sense the answer is yes, but I presume you mean something more than that.)
Phuket? No. *applause* (As an example to clarify my previous answer, I would say that "Phuket" is not a name in English as I understand the term; it is simply an English phonetic representation of the island's name in Thai.)
Tsunami-affected? Yes. *applause*

Though if the answer is yes then we may need a clarification on the meaning of 'East Indies'.

Andaman Sea? Yes. My bad, sorry. I thought I knew the meaning of East Indies and didn't even bother to check. Turns out there's been a gap in my geographical knowledge all my life.

Yes, wikipedia's definition was wider than I expected, but since you'd already quoted wikipedia I assumed you were going with it. BTW I think I have a very good candidate for the answer, but I'll wait a couple of hours or until someone else has had a go.

According to Britannica online's entry on East Indies:

"Historically, the term East Indies is loosely applied to any of three contexts. The most restrictive and best-known use is as a synonym for the islands that now constitute the Republic of Indonesia (formerly known as the Netherlands Indies, or Dutch East Indies); these include the Greater Sunda Islands (Borneo, Celebes, Java, and Sumatra), the Lesser Sunda Islands (stretching eastward from Bali to Timor), the Moluccas, and New Guinea (including Papua New Guinea on the eastern half of the island). In a second, larger sense, East Indies refers to the Malay Archipelago (including the Philippines), which now is more commonly called insular (or archipelagic) Southeast Asia. Finally, in its broadest context, the term East Indies encompasses the foregoing plus all of mainland Southeast Asia and India."

By this account, islands in the Andaman sea would be included in the second definition or the third, depending in turn on the exact meaning of "Malay Archipelago", but not in the first.

On the other hand, that discussion also suggests that perhaps I should not have had reservations about including this island in an archipelago.

Was I there? No. I have never been there.

เกาะ ผีผี (pronounced Pee Pee) is indeed the correct answer. Somehow, Tuj never shows up when he is really needed. (Phi Phi actually refers to a small group of islands, but when answering I had in mind the largest, Phi Phi Don.)

One บะถน handed over.

---

kob kun krab. I couldn't remember the name, but I searched for 'beach movie location' as I remembered about the fuss over bringing in palm trees etc.

This next one is ANIMAL with Abstract connections

[GL] Human? - YES

[Rosie] Still with us? - NO

[CdM] Anglophone? - NO

[irach] The stronger sex? - YES

[FGZstar] Infamy, infamy? - NO
[CdM] European? - NO