I was just reading c’t magazine. They have a consumer help section, where readers who are having problems with tech companies can turn to them for help.
This week, it was a reader who bought a Samsung S20 FE. After 6 months or so, it suddenly started turning itself off and it wouldn’t accept connections over LTE any more, only Edge.
They tried to contact the shop where they bought the phone, but it had gone out of business, so they turned to Samsung Germany directly. Samsung agreed to look at the phone and the reader was sent a packing label to send the phone in.
…A short time later…
The reader received the phone back, in pieces. The repair center in Poland had dismantled the phone into its component pieces, then just packed them up into a packet and sent it back to the reader. The reader was, naturally, outraged, and contacted Samsung to find out why their complete, if faulty, phone was just a pile of pieces!
Samsung’s answer was that they only had a contract to look for the fault and that often requires that the device be dismantled to find the problem. Upon dismantling the phone, the repair center found out that the phone was a United Arab Emirates model and not an EU model. They can’t order parts for UAE phones, so they just packed up the bits and sent them back!
c’t tried to get an answer out of Samsung, where does it say what models are covered by the guarantee, what models aren’t? Why didn’t the check the serial number before it was sent to the repair center? Why didn’t the repair center check the serial number/model number before dismantling it? Why can’t the repair center order spare parts?
They got a half a magazine page of waffle from Samsung that didn’t answer any of the questions.
In the meantime, the reader went to a local repair shop and they replaced the antenna and put the phone back together, re-installed the OS and it works fine now. All for the princely sum of 40€.
Crazy that an independent repair shop can order parts for non-EU models that cost a couple of Euros, but the official Samsung repair facility can’t get hold of the parts!
Link (paywall):