Avoid Like The Plague!

[city02 63]

The touch screen on my 7135 was acting up for the past month - it would go blank/dark in the middle of a call even though the audio would continue.

I had a feeling the screen was about to die after 18 months of usage but being a company provided phone, unless the problem can be duplicated, it does not exist!

Also the power socket for the charger to plug-in has been acting up.

It usually beeps when getting plugged and unplugged but lately it has been beeping a lot while remaining plugged in which implies some sort of loose connection / hardware defect indside.

This prevents proper charging of the battery which went completely dead yesterday and did not respond to resets or recharging (no display on the screen).

I called customer care (that alone was punishment enough) where the agent insisted that I use the 'star codes' to setup call fwd to another RIM!

After repeatedly explaining that my handset was DEAD, so it was impossible to use any kind of handset activation, I finally insisted on speaking to the supervisor.

The entire Ramayan was repeated and the conclusion was again to use the stupid star codes!

Then I demanded further escalation and was able to speak to a manager who finally understood my problem but did not have a solution.

I had to remind them that all telecom operators have the ability to manually switch services on/off from the backend when the client end is not working.

Anyway, they finally managed to switch it on a few hours later so I could continue to get all my incoming calls (thank god for my prepaid motorola!).

Now the ONLY kyocera service center is in Worli for all of greater mumbai which implied a min 3 hour round trip commute for me from the suburbs which i just refused to do and politely asked them to go jump in a lake or other nearby body of water [chullu bhar pani mei doob maro!].

They need to setup pickup/dropoff facilities for all defective handsets at any RWW which could then be sent off to the nearest service center.

For their top end handset and a corporate connection they are mad to think people would be willing to waste that much time when over a defective product.

I plan to buy a backup battery since I think the current one is going to die with the intermittent charging soon.

I would STRONGLY advise AGAINST buying this handset to due the total lack of service and support and accessories available.

If it were'nt free for me (company paid), I would have never got it at all.

The ONLY subscribers who should even consider this are those:

- who MUST have a CDMA connection AND

- are unwilling to carry around two devices (palm & mobile) AND

- REALLY need palm apps (I use about 1% of the available palm capability)

I expect < 5% of people willing to spend Rs 35 K on a handset will fall into this segment.

I plan to start the long and hard fight to have this replaced with the LG or Samsung camera phone in the next few months ...

PS:

All this begs the question - How can a SMARTphone be so stupidly designed?!