Samsung Update: Love affair undone by an Edge S7

It’s sort of funny how things work out. I recently posted up that we are a Samsung Family. From Tablets to TVs, phones, and so on, our house is a virtual history of Samsung for the last decade or so. Samsung has generally been a solid, reliable, and stress free source of the technology that we love. I recently expanded that love to a new Samsung Edge S7 duos. Instead of being love, it’s turned into more of the scorn of a lover hiding a secret.

I bought an Edge S7 duos, which is a neat idea. It supports either dual sim or a single sim and an extra memory card. For where I live, a dual sim isn’t a bad idea. It happens that I received a bonus from one of the local phone companies, a free sim card for a year with a decent amount of free data. I constantly eat data, so having a phone that could let me keep my original plan (and it’s data) and add in another pile of data seemed like a pretty good idea. I shopped hard and ended up buying the phone from the same small shop I have bought a lot of Samsung stuff from.

One of the interesting features of the free sim card is that it has an NFC driven pay option in it. Something actually quite useful in my part of the world, a replacement for pocket change and bus tickets. I was interested to try it out to see. This little idea is where the start of the lovers scorn came in. The NFC wouldn’t transmit. It can read, it can scan existing cards, but it cannot be read itself. Further testing has shown that I cannot send anything use NFC. It’s pretty frustrating, as this is a technology I would love to try out. Then I started to get complaints from people who couldn’t reach me. It seems that the reception on the dual sim phone isn’t quite as good as suggested, with my older Note II having signal when the new phone does not (placed side by side, same carrier…). The Edge S7 from Samsung appears to be easily tricked by non-carrier signals, and tends to go into “emergency only” mode way more often that I would expect.

So I took the phone for service. First off, the local Samsung service is across the city for me, a fairly long process to get there. I made a couple of visits, and both times the lineups for warranty service were so long, it would have taken hours to even get someone to look at the phone (and by look, I mean put it in a bad to be given to a technician a some point). On the third trip, I waited out the time to finally get to the counter. The guy has one look at the phone, types in the serial number, and says “sorry, grey market phone, not warranty”. Yup, my trusted dealer had sold me an out of market device, not a local market device, and Samsung will not provide any service for it – unless I am willing to pay. The bill just to check the phone would come out nearly 10% of the price of the phone. To fix it likely 25%. To deal with the poor reception, well, the guy just said “up to the value of the phone”. There was no top limit.

So what do I have? Well, I have a lemon. It’s a nice lemon. It’s a pretty lemon, but it’s not a trustworthy companion. I use it every day, and I have been forced to have each sim card point calls to the other one when they don’t have service, so that I hope people can reach me. NFC is a fail. Samsung’s customer service is a smoking pile of fail, and of course, the dealer that I trusted so much basically played me, and claims I was aware. Oh, they will replace the phone with a local market version, for a fee somewhere around 40% of the price of the phone – less than 2 months old. Oddly, the recalculated price (after trade in and paying the difference) would get me back to the SAME price I paid originally. Smells bad, don’t it.

Anyway, word to the wise: If you buy Samsung, be ready for warranty hell if you ever need service. The lineups are long, you can easily lose most of a day trying to get service. Beware also of the products you are buying, as Samsung’s warranty does not appear to cross borders well. Take that as a double warning if you travel, if your phone has any problems on a trip don’t bother trying to get it fixed there. Put it away, buy a burner phone for the trip, and accept that one of the biggest companies in the world doesn’t want to help out their clients.

It’s sad. My Samsung love affair is gone. Burned by a deception and lack of compassion, it’s just all gone.