My wife and I bought our first smart phones at the beginning of the month with the buy one get one free deal. My wife got the moto droid and I got in queue for the Incredible. She had hers since the beginning of the month, mine arrived on Friday.
Her Moto Droid has been problematic from the start. She'd drop calls; people could not hear her but she could hear them and they would hang up; experience mystery dials when she would put the phone down; calls sounded tinny, sometime with screeching sounds; gps stopped working on her in a rain storm when she had the car charger plugged into the phone. I don't know if this is the nature of the beast or she's got a bad phone. I searched the forums, discovered this site and followed some of the tips. But it helped a little bit, but not enough for a brand new phone.
We brought it back to the Verizon store the first time (after a little more than 2 weeks of usage) and the tech said all was ok with it, noticed a couple of dropped calls, but nothing major. He told my wife to hold the phone a certain way while she was talking and all would be fine. She started having issues again. I called the store and talked to the support manager. He told me that we could bring the phone in and replace the phone with another Moto Droid or upgrade it to the Incredible. I told him that we did the bogo deal, he said it should not be a problem.
She continued to have issues, especially losing the gps in a storm last week that had traffic diverted because of downed trees. So when my phone arrived last friday, I activated it successfully and we went back to the Verizon store to have tech support look at it again. On our way to Vz, my wife called her mother from my new Incredible and he mother commented on how much better my phone was compared to her moto droid. Now my wife wanted the Incredible.
We got to Verizon store and worked with a technician. He was very friendly and knowledgable. He noticed that the plastic case the verizon saleswoman had put on was put on upside down so the little notch / hole for the microphone was covered. He still could not explain the connection issues, random dialings, gps issue, so he suggested either to upgrade the phone, replace the phone with another droid or try it out with the plastic cover installed correctly and bring it back before the 30 day window was up. I asked if it was ok to upgrade to the Incredible and he said no problem, there would be a $35 restocking fee and sales would take care of it. That seemed fair, so we went to sales.
The sales associate advised that to upgrade to the Incredible, we would have to pay the full upgrade price of $299 since we bought the moto on the buy one get one free - not sure if we had to pay the restocking fee too. When I mentioned that the service manager said we could, they replied that he did not know what he was talking about... So we went back to support and they swapped it with another Moto Droid.
She's still not happy about the new phone. People on the other end can hear her now, but she's still not getting the same reception like she did with her old motorola flip phone on the vz network. I haven't tested mine out enough to notice a difference.
So I called the 800 support number, told her we bought a moto droid and a htc incredible on the bogo deal and we were having issues with the moto. She said to ship it back with the return envelope and they would upgrade her to the incredible. When I advised that we did not have a shipping envelope and bought it from a verizon store, she said we would have to go back to the store we bought it from because the retail stores have different deals than the ones offered by Verizon wireless . I told her that the store I went to was a verizon wireless store - had the sign on the outside, all the posters on the inside and only sold verizon. She said it wasn't. I went to verizonwireless.com and saw that it was listed that way. I even showed the rep I was working with on how to get there indicating that it was a verizon store according to the website and not a third party cellphone store. She put me on hold for a while and came back and advised that I could either one of three things:
1). Get another moto droid replacement,
2). Return the moto and pay for the incredible for $299,
3). Return the moto droid and get either an HTC Eris or LG Ally with the $35 restocking fee.
I'm not really happy with choice 2 or 3 and still getting my mind around the concept that the Verizon Wireless store that has the lighted logo on the sign and roof of the store is not a verizon wireless store. Does this sound fair? Is this how the 30 day worry free guarantee works?
