butterfingers

As mentioned in a previous post I dropped my iPhone a while ago and the whack caused a massive crack on the inner screen (the external glass is fine). That crack lead to the liquid crystal display (LCD) leaking liquid, causing weird grey pixel lines to come snaking up the screen. They were originally in neat little one line increments and now they’re just doing their own thing.

So I traveled to the US. I tried to get my Indian iPhone screen fixed for the princely sum of $200 at an Apple Store. End result: No dice.

The Apple Stores abroad are not allowed to replace phones that are not bought in the same country. So much for a world-wide warranty. If you break your phone while traveling you’re essentially screwed. On a side note the grey pixels appear to have stopped marching up my screen. In fact some of them seem to have gone into remission and have started working again. I don’t know how long they’ll stay this way but I hope it’ll last long enough for Apple to release their new iPhone.

I dropped my iPhone about 3 weeks ago. It has a nasty crack running from the lower right all the way up to the top left in a rather elegant arc. All the functions still work, it just looks like it got hit by a bullet or something. 

This isn’t a hacked or jailbroken grey-market phone either, just a bog-standard iPhone 3G from Vodafone. So I call them up and ask them if they can replace the screen. They tell me nobody has asked them about that yet and that they’ll get back to me. Of course, they don’t get back to me. I have to ask again and then I finally get an answer the following morning. It’ll cost me Rs. 28,000 ($600) Rs. 33,500 ($690), see the update below. The brand new phone would cost me Rs. 34,500 ($705).  To his credit, the Vodafone rep was apologetic. He said he was as shocked as I was that it cost so much. Apparently they don’t fix the screen, they just give you a new phone. I guess the Rs. 8000 off is some sort of butterfingers discount There is no discount, unless you call Rs. 1000 off and they keep the old phone a discount.

Anyway, so I go, “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll live with my busted ass phone.”

That worked for about 2 weeks. But now, there’s this grey line of pixels snaking its way up my screen from the bottom. It’s actually growing one line of pixels at a time, starting from the right where the hit occurred and working its way to the left. Once the line of pixels fills up with grey it goes up to the next line. It’s on the fourth line now and it started about 8 hours ago. I wonder if the whole damned screen is going to be grey when I wake up tomorrow morning.

Update:

It’ll cost just Rs. 1000 less than a brand new phone and they take away the old phone to give me a “replacement”. I had to drive all the way to the main Vodafone store to find out this nugget of information and they didn’t even have a 16gig phone in stock essentially making my trip a complete waste. What a bunch of incompetent twits. I think I’m going to try and get it fixed in New York next month. I’ll call the Brooklyn store tonight and see if that’s possible.