OK, time for some serious ranting!
Two year ago I spent a fortune one a Sony Ericsson P900. It served me well untill it fell on the kitchen floor after a year. The phone still worked, but the screen was broken, so I send it in for repair. About a week and a half later I got the message that the phone could not be repaired due to water damage. Stupid me accepted it although I knew there could not have been water damage (the phone worked perfectly except for the screen). Buy hey, I saw an excuse to buy a P910.
However, this time I took an insurance with the phone which means I get free repair or replacement. Again a year later (december 2006) my P910 fell into the kitchen sink (with water). But this time I think, no worries, I have insurance.
I bring back the phone to where I bought it (together with the insurance): Bel Company. The friendly people at the store take my phone and send it of to a repair center. And I get a replacement phone: some old, no longer existing Nokia model which has none of the features of my fancy P910. One month later ... no word back from the phone. And this is where it gets ugly. In the store they tell me that phones that are insured take longer to check or repair. Without insurance they take a quick look and send it back as 'impossible to repair', if you pay a monthly insurance they take all the time they need to check every possible way to repair it (which is probably cheaper then replacing it).
So, pay insurance and you will get:
- A crappy replacement phone that has none of the features of the insured phone.
- Extra long repair time.
The good news?
I was fed up with the crap Nokia, so I bought the cheapest bluetooth enabled phone in the store, a Sony Ericsson K750i. And guess what, it's a great phone. Syncs perfectly with my new Mac, operates smoothly with the TomTom, has perfect access to Gmail (through the mini-java-client), has a decent camera (2 megapixel) and it even works as a remote control for my MacBook. The one big disadvantage is the maximum of 500 contacts in the address book. I have plenty of memory on the memory stick but the phone only allows 500 cards. If anyone has a solution for that, I'd love to hear it.
