My sister Kristin has an LG Chocolate that has recently decided to throw up a white screen instead of a regular boot-up screen. This is a common problem according to the internet; the LG Chocolate is an expensive phone, but apparently also a low-quality phone. After about six months of use the LG Chocolate, it tends to simply stop working properly, most likely due to a malfunction in the flex cable that connects the two sliding parts. I can’t count the number of comments I found on the internet bewailing this exact problem. There were literally thousands of them, all complaining about the quality of the LG Chocolate.

Basically, the LG Chocolate is a crap phone. As far as I can tell, you should avoid buying one at any cost.

She brought the phone to the Telus store. It was still under warranty. She expected, reasonably, that Telus would fix or replace the phone, due to what appeared to be a manufacturing defect. Instead, she was told, due to a moisture-sensitive sticker that had turned red behind her battery, that her warranty was void, and that they would reject the phone for warranty work. On top of that, they told her that if she sent it in, she’d be charged $25 even if they did nothing to the phone. The icing on the cake was when they offered her $100 off a new phone, as if that makes junking a $300 phone after six months okay.

That’s disgraceful service. Utterly abysmal to the point of being a slap in the face to Kristin, a customer who simply wants a mobile phone that works.

Verizon is replacing LG Chocolates because of this defect. It’s a well documented defect. Yet here’s Telus essentially denying there’s a problem, inventing a flimsy excuse to void her warranty, and saying, “We don’t care about you.” That’s awful.

Tags: crap, hardware, lg, mobiles, verizon