A report by the consumer watchdog, Which? revealed that an outrageous amount of 2 million among the 18 million mobiles that were sold over the previous year had been diagnosed with flaws.
With one out of every set of seven new handsets having faults, approximately 70% cases arose during the initial half year itself. What’s more, around 27% of mobile phone users seemed distraught and dissatisfied with the customer care service they were given in response to their complaints.
Among the pits records, operator 3 fared the worst, as out of its every three handsets, one was found to harbour networking problems, that too in the first year of securing the phone. Contrarily, Tesco and Virgin Mobile network providers proved their mettle in terms of reliability, along with handset giants, Nokia and Samsung. However, Motorola and Sony Ericsson handsets dwindled miserably in this front.
Consumer group, Which? attributed these slip-ups to the newly found 3G mobile technology, (third generation mobile technology) saying that it was in its “teething” phase, thereby the technical hitches. Meanwhile, operator 3’s Rachel Channing, felt it was unfair to place the new 3G technology at par with the tried and tested GSM technology, as the novel 3G technology involved more complexities with video and music downloads etc. that could be expected to pose a few problems.
Scrutinising the sample used by Which? for the survey, Channing was quoted saying, “The sample they picked out was only 50 customers. We have three million. It was only 16 who had experienced problems, so we don't think it is a representative sample.” Adding that even the new technology was undergoing advancement, she said that the so-called faulty handsets had been “superseded by ones that perform much better on the network.”
However, reports by Which? drew an altogether different picture wherein myriad drawbacks were noticed in phones, like defective keypads, networking troubles, inconveniences in contacts storage, etc.
Which? also informed that a shop was legally supposed to handle and assume full responsibility of the defective handset in the event of the problem observed within six months of purchase by the customer, if the store was unable to prove that the fault had occurred due to the customer.
As Pete Tynan, the writer of the report advised, “People get passed from pillar to post. In fact is it is up to the place you bought it from to sort it out. Don't let them fob you off.”
Posted
on : Fri, 05 Aug 2005 15:20 GMT | General News
By : Salim Patel
|
