Advice Regarding Tmobile Contract & iPhone 4s

loonywitch

Morning peeps,

I'm hoping you can advise me before I ring tmobile and kick off big time!

Basically in April 2012 I took out a 2 year contract with them for an iPhone 4s. The phone is in near perfect condition and hasn't been damaged but the top button (power button) has suddenly given up working with no reason at all!!

I have friends in Apple who advised me that though they only come with a 1 year warranty, the product is covered under EU Consumer law for 2 years from date of purchase and the seller (tmobile, now EE) should offer repair or replacement for free as long as there is no sign of significant damage (i.e. water damage, dropped the phone, etc).

I've contacted tmobile & EE via twitter and they provided me with a link to Apple which advises me to contact the seller (perhaps the agent needs to read more carefully!) so I contacted them by phone and spent a good half hour on the phone.

First they quickly offered to send a jiffy bag out which would cost me £10...I asked if he was confirming it would be repaired/replaced free of charge and he said no there would be a charge because it was out of warranty. I then went through the whole EU consumer law again and he said he would check with someone, came back and said I had to contact Apple. I pointed out what the Apple website and my friends had said, he put me on hold again and came back. He said they would have to assess the phone before saying whether they would charge which I am extremely sceptical about. This cannot be done in store meaning I have to send it off without any guarantee it will come back in the same condition or fixed. (And I am not lying when I say the phone is in near perfect condition). Tmobile also want to charge me a deposit for a lone phone in the mean time which will be a bog basic phone against a phone that is worth a lot more.

I demanded that this be looked into further because he still did not seem certain around the EU Consumer Law and requested a call back. This was last Thursday and I still haven't received one.

To add to this, I am heavily pregnant and I need to be able to contact someone by phone if I am out alone. A text simply isn't good enough because I don't know if the recipient has received it. I pointed this out to the agent stressing the urgency of the call back...afterall, if the iphone freezes which they are known for doing, I have to press the top and home button in for the reset which I can't do. The agent acknowledged this and said he would note all this info down.

So still no phone call and I've allowed them near on a week and yesterday evening my phone crashed! I couldn't do anything. Luckily I was with my husband but I had to wait for the battery to drain itself so I could charge it back up and now is working fine again.

To top all of this off, I've had a lot of problems with signal recently (calls failing even before connecting or during conversation which has annoyed me when I'm ringing an 0845 number!) and I've had numerous missed calls from someone working on behalf of tmobile trying to offer me a free ipad (contract) and additional lines because they want to reward me for being a loyal customer. What a joke!!

Has anyone had experience with this before I ring them again? I've also heard I can throw in the Sales of Goods Act because they've sold me a phone that isn't fit for purpose for the duration of my contract. Any advice is welcome.

Thank you!

grumbler

See these recent threads:
iPhone Faulty - Apple vs Carphone Warehouse
EU consumer law? iPhone 4
have fun with three

That said, pregnancy etc. are absolutely irrelevant. If you need a reliable connection just use the sim (with an adapter possibly) in any other unlocked phone. The cheapest ones cost just about a tenner. Or get a free PAYG sim from '3' and use it with a cheap handset. Calls are just 3p.

Frozen_up_north

Faulty power on/off buttons are a very common problem with the iPhone. I took my 9 month old iPhone 5 to an Apple store recently and it was swapped there and then for a new replacement phone of the same model.

While there I saw other people with the same issue. So you will have a good case for the goods being of poor quality from manufacture, rather than an isolated fault that developed later.

However, your claim has to be against T-Mobile as suppliers of the phone... Mine was purchased directly from Apple, so no 3rd party involvement.

gjchester

loonywitch wrote: »

I have friends in Apple who advised me that though they only come with a 1 year warranty, the product is covered under EU Consumer law for 2 years from date of purchase

Sorry but your friends are wrong.

Apple only offer a 1 year guarantee.

The 2 year EU reference is to an EU directive but is not implimented on UK Law, and our sale of goods act gives you better protection anyway. The 2 years refers to how long you have to register a fault that was there at time of purchase (whereas we already have 6 years under the SOGA) NOT the warranty length.


http://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2010/12/13/the-eu-goods-must-last-a-minimum-two-years-rule-is-a-myth/

loonywitch wrote: »

To add to this, I am heavily pregnant and I need to be able to contact someone by phone if I am out alone.

To top all of this off, I've had a lot of problems with signal recently (calls failing even before connecting or during conversation which has annoyed me when I'm ringing an 0845 number!)

No network guarantees service in all locations, and while I understand your concern a perfect signal is not something any network can give you. The nature of a radio network means there will be times you will have no signal, or you move to an area of no signal you will get calls dropped, its clearly stated in the networks T&C as such.

loonywitch wrote: »

I've also heard I can throw in the Sales of Goods Act because they've sold me a phone that isn't fit for purpose for the duration of my contract. Any advice is welcome.

Thank you!

Sale of goods act may help, but after 19 months the onus is on you to prove the fault has been there from day one. As it's a part thats mainly internal tothe phone the external condition is not relevent, it could be something as simple as fluff thats preventing it working, or it could be the electronics failed. Before you start google the iPhone 4s's moisure detector stickers and check they are OK, if they are tripped then all bets are off, any repair will be chargeable.

Your only real option is getting an independant repairer to check the phone over, they will charge for this, but if they state it's a manufacturing fault yu may be able to claim it that fee back from T-mobile and ask TMoblie to repair it. You could also get the work done by an independant repairer and sue T-Molbie for the repair cost , however theres no guarantee of a win

Any repairs are likely to chargable and done by Apple, however bear in mind that with Apple it's not a repair as such, they'll simply replace it with another, they keep your phone and you get a replacment. Yours gets fixed and goes back into the chain, it means you get a repaired phone faster, usualy less than a week than waiting for your actual phone to be fixed. It may not be what you want but thats the way Apple works.

You may want to consider finding a local repairer, a power switch repair will be £30 to £40 at most, and may be far less hassle.

grumbler

gjchester wrote: »

...after 19 months the onus is on you to prove the fault has been there from day one.

Absolutely not. A fault can develop later as a result of some flaw in design that was there from the day one.

gjchester

grumbler wrote: »

Absolutely not. A fault can develop later as a result of some flaw in design that was there from the day one.

I didn't mean to say otherwise, sorry it it came out like that.

Its just in the first 6 months after purchase it's down to the maker/retailer to prove it wasn't a manufacturing fault. After that the onus is on the purchaser to prove it's an fault that was there rather than wear and tear.

loonywitch

Thanks for all your advice/comments but Tmobile/EE are refusing to budge on the matter and have still failed to contact me back about it.

grumbler

Hardly a surprise.
If you read the threads you'll see that you have to be very determined to enforce your rights. Alternative is to pay £150+ to Apple and take it on the chin.

loonywitch

Not a chance! I'm a very determined person and fobbing me off only makes me worse.

I'm actually disgusted by the customer service provided by my network provider. This is the first time I've had to deal with them since the "official takeover" and previously Tmobile have been very helpful. Needless to say I will not be renewing my contract and I certainly won't be recommending them anymore. Off to 3 I go in April!

I will probably pay to get the unit fixed at the very, very last resort (assume once I'm blue in the face and physically don't have the energy to argue) but I'll go through my house insurance.

gjchester

loonywitch wrote: »

Needless to say I will not be renewing my contract and I certainly won't be recommending them anymore. Off to 3 I go in April!

All the networks will be the same over iDevices, Apple insist they (or their agents) are the only ones who do swap outs, so all networks will be the same, after 1 year the Apple warranty expires unless you buy Applecare in that first year, and while some cases have been resolved in store as a goodwill gesture its just that, Goodwill.

loonywitch wrote: »

I will probably pay to get the unit fixed at the very, very last resort (assume once I'm blue in the face and physically don't have the energy to argue) but I'll go through my house insurance.

The phone is 19 months old and out of warranty, Your home insurance will have an excess, it may be cheaper to look for a local repairer, or use someone online. A quick google seach (no I'm not related to them, I used a company close to my home to fix my wifes) comes up with http://iphonespecialist.co.uk with the reapir listed at £30 plus postage to them.

grumbler

House insurance covers an accidental damage, not fault.

Generally, you are going to commit fraud by saying that the phone was damaged.