USA – When Amy Gahran called about getting her bricked N95 fixed she was told it could be 30 days before she’d see her phone again. What’s more, she’d have to ship it herself. We’ve taken these issues to Nokia USA and they’ve come back with some good, and useful info.
First up, there’s an excellent tool to work out the status of your device’s warranty. Simply enter your serial number and it’ll let you know how long you have left and a brief overview of what’s covered. The same site will also enable you to track repairs. If you’d rather deal by phone you can also call Nokia or your carrier directly (if you bought your phone through them).
Whilst there is a stated 30 day turnaround in the warranty policy, this is designed to capture all Nokia products and typically applies to older products where spares may not be readily available. Nokia USA assures us devices are typically returned within 7-10 days and that 85 per cent of those returns happen within seven days. This is much closer to the time frame Amy (and we) feel is acceptable.
To be special, we reckon a five day turnaround for Nseries devices would help boost confidence somewhat. And here’s the kicker. If you live in NY or Chicago, you can roll your phone into the local Nokia Flagship store where it’ll be repaired within three days. This is on a par with other device manufacturers in the US, but as Amy rightly points out in another part of her post, there simply isn’t the breadth of Nokia service centres in the US to make this feasible for the masses. That though, could be about to change.
The key here though is that in the majority of cases, the device would be repaired and returned within 10 days, which is itself a substantial jump on the 30 days quoted.
The other point Amy raised was whether the device would be covered if it keeled over during a firmware upgrade. The response from customer care we got is simply “if the phone does not turn on and is within the
warranty period that Nokia will either fix the phone or supply a replacement”. This of course applies to devices that were destined for, and bought in the USA.
You can get full details on US warranties here.
What else do you think needs to happen here?