Header image: Mysterious Qdoba Package Again by Elvis Ripley (via Flickr) – Used according to its Creative Commons 2.0 license.
September 3rd 2016
It’s saturday afternoon, in a few hours I’m having dinner with a few friends at a nearby town fair, and I suppose OnePlus Customer Support does not work on saturdays. I was wrong, but didn’t bother searching: I didn’t have that much time to had to prepare my emergency phone and to get ready to leave for the night out. Unfortunately I had already sold Uno to a friend, and the same happened for Odin, so my most recent phone was Zapotec, my old HTC Desire… Luckily, my mother had also recently changed phone, so I could use the 1st generation Moto G I bought her for Christmas a few years ago.
Jumping from an OnePlus Two to a 1st Gen Moto G is not pleasant, but the little buddy runs Lollipop decently, and I thought I would have just to live with it for a few weeks at most.
September 5th 2016
It’s about time I login to the OnePlus site and start a service request. The procedure is rather straightforward, except the initial confusion when I notice there is no button to create a new service request in the “Service Requests” area, but instead you have to go to “My Orders”, and choose the order you want to open a service request for. No problem here, there are a few orders in the list, but only one OnePlus Two, so I can’t be wrong. I pick the order, pick the phone, and proceed to explain what the issue is.
The phone suffers from intermittent random signal loss. I’ve started noticing it last week. The signal would drop to 0 for a varying amount of time (ranging from minutes to hours). I have tried switching sim card slot, tried a different sim card, but the problem persists. I also tried my sim card on a different OP2 device, and the sim would operate fine. I have reset my phone to factory settings from the recovery, but the issue still remains. Attached you can find a screenshot of a GSM monitoring app where the random signal drop is visible (“Fuori servizio” means “out of order” in Italian).
I tried to do my best to describe the problem and what I have attempted to do to solve it. My biggest concern here is that the issue is not always present (although it occurred more often and lasted longer over time), and I fear the service center might not notice it at first and think the phone is good, and I’m a little off. Luckily I have the screenshots from the GSM monitoring application (those from the previous post), maybe they’ll trust those.
I send the request 16xxxxxxxxxxx02 and hope. I’m really pleased to see that the request is accepted very quickly, and that in a few hours I get a message from the repair center, Arvato, and a shipping label from UPS. The tone of the email is very reassuring, and since everything was so fast, I already felt reassured.
What did I need to feel reassured about? Well, a couple of months earlier I advised my boss to buy a OnePlus Three to replace his ageing Nexus 5, and I saw his unpleasant experience with OnePlus customer support. I also felt quite guilty for that, because I was the one recommending OnePlus to him. Well, not just to him, but he was my boss, and was not happy at all with how he was treated. But this is another story.
September 6th 2016
My phone is ready for his trip to the doc. I packed it in the original box, applied the shipping label, and waited. Later that day, UPS arrived, and took my phone for his trip.
I was really happy, everything was super smooth. Probably my boss was just really unlucky!
September 8th 2016
My phone arrives at its destination.
It’s now that the problems begin…
Always Settle 