Less than a year ago, I forked out for a brand new HTC One. Yet when I ran into a problem with it this weekend, T-Mobile told me it wasn’t covered by my warranty. But should the repairs have been covered?
After a run of serious problems with my last phone, I treated myself to an HTC One last June. And until this weekend, it had worked a treat.
However, when I went to charge my phone on Saturday night, I found that the charging cable wouldn’t fit into the port in my phone anymore. It was bizarre – the phone had barely been used, let alone dropped/shaken/damaged since the night before.
A call for help
I started to panic and called the T-Mobile customer helpline. The advisor I spoke to told me to look into the port for any obvious signs of blockage, but I couldn’t see anything. She then told me I would have to take it into a store to get fixed, and warned me that it wouldn’t be covered by my warranty.
In fact, she said that my warranty only covered issues with the phone’s software. Warranty or not, I knew I had rights against the retailer with the Supply of Goods and Services Act, so I headed into my local EE store and asked them to take a look. They offered to send it away to be fixed, but also warned it wouldn’t be free and that it could take up to 28 days. They couldn’t even give me a vague idea of the potential cost of getting it fixed.
Phone abuse
I argued with the sales assistant that I didn’t expect a £450 phone to be unusable within less than a year – particularly when I’d taken good care of it. He explained that he saw this issue a lot with phones, as people ‘rammed’ their cables into the delicate charging port. I argued that I’d been very careful with it.
In the end, I took the phone to a mobile phone stall in the shopping mall area. The very helpful gentleman there looked into the charging port and extracted a well-hidden piece of fluff and fixed it up for nothing (what a relief!).
Had my charging port been genuinely damaged, do you think that the potential repairs to my phone should have been covered by the warranty?
Loading ...
