In your FACE, Sony Ericsson

UPDATED 2 JULY 2015: During 2015 the domain name repairmob.com was purchased by a different company based in the United States. The comments made in this post bear no relation to the new owners of this domain name. This note has been added out of courtesy to the new owners.

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I fixed it!!!

This is an update to my post from yesterday about Chris' shitty broken Sony Ericsson.

I looked at it again last night, as I said, and tried the Phone Repair function that is part of its program on my PC again. It had already failed to repair it several times on Monday, so I thought it was a bit of a long-shot last ditch attempt, but I had suspected that the reason it was failing was that the battery wasn't lasting long enough each time for it to wipe and reload the software before the phone switched off.

It was difficult to charge the phone though, because it seemed to refuse to charge for more than 10 minutes at a time before all its lights went off and it looked suspiciously like it was ignoring the power input. So in the end I kept unplugging and replugging it every time the lights went off until I decided it might have enough power stored up to give it a go.

And it worked! I was SO surprised, as normally these things never do anything. It successfully downloaded the newest version of the software from Sony Ericsson, accessed the phone in some weird Flash drive mode, wiped everything (this is the point where it kept failing and I thought I might have actually made the phone worse than before), and then shoved the software back in before it ran out of power.

And now the phone is up and running again! Yes it has lost all of its previous data and phone numbers, but that ship sailed the minute it packed in on the plane anyway.

AND we won't have to pay anything getting it fixed, or mess about sending it off for repair. And that's probably all the repair person would have done anyway, so it would have been a total rip off.

So yay me!

One thing I forgot to mention before was that I am APPALLED by the new 'repair under warranty' system that Orange seem to be operating. When we went to the Orange shop and the guy agreed it needed to go off for repair, he gave Chris a card for a repair company who he said were now handling all their repairs. But in order to send it off to them for assessment and repair, even under warranty, you have to pay the company a £15 handling fee! How is that even legal? If it's broken and under warranty, it should be fixed at the expense of the retailer or manufacturer, surely? So we weren't very happy about that at all.

But anyway, fuck it, it's fixed now and it didn't cost anything, so repairmob.com and Sony Ericsson and Orange can all suck my balls. They'll have to form an orderly queue though.

FINGERS CROSSED it will remain fixed and not screw itself up again. My C510 lasted without error for a year after it had its software upgraded, so I'm hoping this will be the same.

I shall be basking in my own smugness until such time as it breaks again anyway :-)