Mad at HTC US Repair - and Question about VOX keyboard gaps

[Guest Socrates]

The story is kind of long below as to why I'm mad at HTC's Texas repair center, so before the sotry , just have 2 questions:

1. Anyone else used HTC to repair a handset, did it turn out OK?

2. Anyone have a newer built VOX/s710 that has about a 1/16th inch or more gap between either the top of the keys and the glass or between the bottom of the keys and the case?

Now, here's the story:

So I fell on my pocket and cracked the LCD in my HTC s710.

Would have just purchased a new 730, but all indications are the handset is one step away from a brick thanks to memory problems HTC won't agknowledge.

So, called up HTC, asked price and turn around for LCD replacement. Told it's about $150, and it takes 48 hours after receipt to diagnose, they will call me at that point, I will aprove the repair, then they will take just a day or two to repair and ship it back. That sounds pretty great, so off it goes, next day air on a Thursday. On Friday at 11AM UPS shows it delivered and signed for.

Call the following Wednesday to find out why I haven't been called. They haven't "received" it yet. Turns out what they do is just don't mark it as "received" until they feel like getting around to looking at it. I think the day they finally "received" it was Friday, about 7 days after they received it in reality.

It then took about a week to diagnose it. Then another week to "repair" and "test" it. And by "repair" it I mean they sent me a different unit, with a different IMEI number, but the same serial number, that they couldn't possibly have "tested" because it doesn't actually work consistently (rmore below), and not only does it not work, the Keyboard is actually TOO SMALL for the case and slides around on there.

The problems with this handset are several.

One, it physically doesn't fit together right. The keybord is about a 1/16th of an inch too short and because of this it slides up and down, leaving a significant gap either at the top or the bottom. If the gap is at the top, the soft keys' little plastic tabs occasionally pop up out from under the screen cover glass.

Two, right out of the box it wouldn't boot until I put the battery in and out several times. It was just a black screen, green light wouldn't come on. Charging light worked. Thought at first it was a battery problem, even though it had been charging a while before I had time to mess with it - but it wasn't. When it finally came on the battery showed about 50%.

After initally setting up the network settings, and locale settings and doing the initial connection to WMDC, and confirming it had a newer rom in it, it froze up requiring a battery pull to reset it. Then after freezing up it had a white screen complaining to me that I shouldn't take the battery out and it forced a hard reset in order to start back up. So, I'm thinking, wtf is with this new rom!

Anyway, got it all set up again, but had some trouble rebooting it several times. Would be just like at first, either nothing would happen on pressing power or it would hang for 10 minutes at the WinMo logo. Then this morning it just won't boot back up at all. It kept vanishing from WMDC so I restarted it to see if that would help, and now it's a brick. Get a green light sometimes, but nothing on the screen.

Way to go HTC!!!

I'll call them tomorrow and see what they will do, but I'm kind of pissed. they ate up like 3 weeks of my time and about $200 bucks after all the shipping, etc.

Edited February 17, 2008 by Socrates

[Guest plenoach]

I had a successfully 'repaired' bluetooth module (new main board) but endured the same delay before "accepting" the item that had been shipped to them and the experience suffered from generally poor communication. It bothers me that they don't recognize the importance of minimizing device downtime for business use.

They did not create any fittment issues as you describe but put either a scratch or small blob of something on the inside of my screen.

They also did not address a flight mode battery burn issue that I'll raise in another thread.