The Vodafone repair process caught on video | Hacker News Reader

The Vodafone repair process caught on video

blog.vodafone.co.uk

25 pointsbws2212 comments

> like welding bits on the motherboard

That really caught my eye, did they mean soldering and used welding or is there actually stuff welded to the board of phones?

Since Vodaphone is US-based (just a guess from the domain) is this an accepted use of the word welding? Could be one of those colloquialisms like taking a "lift" vs an "elevator".

UK-based, rather. Grr.. stupid muscle memory :o)

As a UK resident, they just got the word wrong.

No welding involved—beyond problems of forming poorly-performing alloys (already a concern and the reason for plating orders to get some PCB finishes), the heat of welding would certainly delaminate copper from the board substrate.

I'm currently stuck with a Lumia 800 with a penchant for crashing thanks to Vodafone's "repair" service.

I explained in a written letter how the phone would crash at frequent intervals (especially when playing or recording video). Being a developer I even wrote the letter as I would write a bug report with steps on how to replicate the problem and what not.

They returned the phone to me with a standard letter saying how they fixed the phone by upgraded the OS to the latest version.

The OS was of course already updated to the latest version before I even sent it to them. They even tried ringing me on the broken phone I had sent them so I could explain what my problem was. I'm not sure how they thought I would answer it exactly...

I tried again and received the same response. Needless to say, my phone is still broken.

I'm not sure how they thought I would answer it exactly

Because number are tied to SIM-cards not phones. I've never sent my SIM card off to be repaired. Just pop your SIM card into a new phone before sending your broken one off and you'll have not trouble answering when they (or anybody else) calls.

I had an interesting problem with an LG phone that froze or reset while recording or playing video. I sent it three times to the service and came back "repaired". Every time the same issue happened.

Then I found that before they were sending it to repair, the phone was stripped of everything (battery, SD card). It worked on their side, so the problem had to be one of the components that were not actually tested. So I tried a different (faster) SD card - and no more issues! The problem was the SD card - it came with the phone, but when they were sending the device to the service, they did not send also the SD card.

To be fair, any process can have breakdowns.

I'd like to see a video of their complaints process. :-)

There's a bit of uninspired marketing-drone-boilerplate in the blogpost, but the video is actually quite good. I suspect it's a great way to connect with the technically interested who, especially in the case of mobile providers, are probably key drivers for advocacy.

The video is pretty impressive, but after seeing all that I wonder whether it is really worth it to fix a Nokia feature phone rather than just replacing it. I suppose it must be, but I wonder by how much?

"There are different levels of accreditation as well, starting at relatively simple changes such as back covers or keypads, through to more advanced stuff like welding bits on the motherboard."

Now that would be something to see.

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