Good service from Apple Store for broken iPhone
I bought the original iPhone, just a couple of days after it was first released. That means that I'd had the phone for over a year, and it was now out of warranty.
The touch screen started acting up, with a "dead area" which either didn't respond at all, or triggered actions from a lower area of the screen that I wasn't actually pointing at. I'd been able to work around the problem for a while, but then the it finally go so bad that I couldn't type certain letters, backspace acted like Return, etc. I tried getting around the typing problems in the apps where the keyboard would turn sideways, but that only yielded a different set of problems.
I finally gave up when I couldn't manually dial a number because the "Call" button for the numeric keypad was in the dead area.
I was fully expecting to have to buy a new iPhone 3G. In some ways that would have been a nice excuse to upgrade, but the only moderately useful new feature for me would have been true GPS. There's no 3G coverage in my immediate area, so paying $10 more a month for the same 2G service I used to get, minus the included text messaging on the old plan, didn't seem like a great deal.
Until my old iPhone broke down, I was prepared to wait for the next iteration of the iPhone after the current 3G, hoping for something like a faster processor, a better camera, stereo Bluetooth -- or preferably all of those.
As it turns out, I can keep waiting, and stick with my current cheaper AT&T plan in the meantime. I showed my broken 2G iPhone to a guy at the Genius Bar at the nearby Apple Store and, even though my phone was out of warranty, he told me that the touchscreen failure was a problem that was rare, but that Apple was tracking the issue and would replace phones that exhibited the problem, even out of warranty.
I didn't expect that the store would even have old 2G phones in stock, but they did, so I unexpectedly walked out of the store with a shiny new 2G iPhone, without paying for a new 3G phone, and without a new two-year commitment to a data plan I didn't want, all of which is how I originally fully expected the situation to turn out.
The touch screen started acting up, with a "dead area" which either didn't respond at all, or triggered actions from a lower area of the screen that I wasn't actually pointing at. I'd been able to work around the problem for a while, but then the it finally go so bad that I couldn't type certain letters, backspace acted like Return, etc. I tried getting around the typing problems in the apps where the keyboard would turn sideways, but that only yielded a different set of problems.
I finally gave up when I couldn't manually dial a number because the "Call" button for the numeric keypad was in the dead area.
I was fully expecting to have to buy a new iPhone 3G. In some ways that would have been a nice excuse to upgrade, but the only moderately useful new feature for me would have been true GPS. There's no 3G coverage in my immediate area, so paying $10 more a month for the same 2G service I used to get, minus the included text messaging on the old plan, didn't seem like a great deal.
Until my old iPhone broke down, I was prepared to wait for the next iteration of the iPhone after the current 3G, hoping for something like a faster processor, a better camera, stereo Bluetooth -- or preferably all of those.
As it turns out, I can keep waiting, and stick with my current cheaper AT&T plan in the meantime. I showed my broken 2G iPhone to a guy at the Genius Bar at the nearby Apple Store and, even though my phone was out of warranty, he told me that the touchscreen failure was a problem that was rare, but that Apple was tracking the issue and would replace phones that exhibited the problem, even out of warranty.
I didn't expect that the store would even have old 2G phones in stock, but they did, so I unexpectedly walked out of the store with a shiny new 2G iPhone, without paying for a new 3G phone, and without a new two-year commitment to a data plan I didn't want, all of which is how I originally fully expected the situation to turn out.