In June of 2012, I purchased the Samsung Galaxy S3. Little did I know that it would be a $400 mistake. Not the purchase of the phone, but the purchase of the phone from T-Mobile.
Less than a month after the purchase I started ving connectivity issues. They don't tell you, but when your display shows an "E" where the 4G should be, you are in 2G. Anyway after weeks of functioning in 2G, I took the phone to the retail store where I purchased it. I explained my issue and they switched out the sim card. It worked... temporarily.
about a month later, I again had the same problem. I returned to the store, where the manager took out the battery, sim card and SD card. After they were replaced, again it worked...temporarily.
Afew weeks later, I called customer service about the connectivity issue. They connected me to tech support, who recommended I take out the battery, the sim card, and the SD card and restart. Then they suggested that I check the connection settings. After checking the settings, I had 4G...temporarily.
Now its 3 1/2 months after buying the phone and I am on vacation in Los Angeles. Clearly a huge market for any cellular carrier in the U.S. Little did I know that I would have 2G or no cell service, no sending or receiving of text messages or emails, and random voice mails from phone calls that would not go through to my phone. The only way to use the phone at all, was to connect to the Hotel WIFI. This continued during my entire drive back to the S.F. Bay area.
So once again I am on the phone with customer support/tech support. This time I am told to clear the cache and perform a hard reset of the phone. For those of you who do not know what a hard reset does, it makes you lose all of your downloads including phone numbers, music, texts, etc. unless you back them up to your SD card, I was told. I perform these recommendations, and lo and behold, 4g...temporarily.
So now I have lost my stored info, music, pics, etc. and the phone is still in 2G. So once again I call CS/TS for help. This time I explain to them that I have done everything they want me to do, and that we have established that the problem is not the network, but the phone. They tell me that they can do a warranty exchange. Which I agree to, but only for a NEW phone.
Here is my problem with this entire debacle... This phone is now 5 months old. The issue was first identified after approx 38 days. For the last 4 months I have been wasting time checking this and reseting that. To no avail. The next step for T-Mobile is to check the cell towers in my home area...twice now!! If they want to confirm the towers are working they have to check them all the way down I-5 to L.A. Yet they still wont just replace the defective phone with a new, not refurbished handset.
Is it unreasonable to want a new handset after 5 months of attempting to trouble shoot a defective phone? And oh yeah,in their defense, they did offer me an HTC something with a smaller screen and fewer options than the S3... Even one of the CS guys admitted that the HTC is a downgrade.
I now have a fax message over to "Customer Relations", the guy in a bubble that you cant call, email or text. You have to shoot him a letter and wait for a response.
What would anyone else do at this point?