Is your Nokia 5800 completely screwed too?

Has your Nokia 5800 turned into a gibbering mass of electronic rubbish, useful only for hammering nails into walls and as a good looking paperweight?

MIR reader, Matt, has been suffering with his 5800 ever since he bought it. He even had to engineer is own fix for the battery involving some scissors and a piece of cardboard.
Have a read…

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Hi Ewan

You’ll have to excuse me here slightly as the exact dates are lost on me I’m afraid!

I purchased the 5800 from the Carphone Warehouse Store in Barrow-in-Furness late February, I suspect it will have been February 27th. I believe Gerry will have purchased his the very same day, or at most within 4 days afterwards.

My original handset developed a fault within 5 days, the handset was simply dead, turned itself off and then it decided it didn’t quite fancy turning back on again. The store agreed to switch the handset for a new one.

Within 2 months of owning the second handset I noticed the phone developed a habit of switching itself off. I realised that the battery had too much ‘give’ on the terminals, however sticking a small piece of card in the side of the battery cavity and the battery itself made the connection firm, more or less eliminating the problem.

Around May time I popped into the local Carphone Warehouse again to enquire for release dates for the N97. While I was there I started chatting to the salesman in there who I knew bought a 5800 on the same day as me. While we were speaking he pulled out his 5800, handed it to me and asked “Has yours done this?” The screen had completely broken up, with multicoloured horizontal lines across the screen. A couple of flicks of the key lock switch and the screen returned to normal. I was obviously thankful mine hadn’t had the same issue!

Spoke too soon…literally within one week it happened on the first occasion. I pulled my phone out my pocket to read a text and had the dreaded lines across the screen (these lines leave it completely unusable). As previously though, flicking the keylock a few times seemed to fix it.

This carried on for months on end, however I soon realised it was happening more and more often, and also taking longer and longer for it to return to normal. Flicking the keylock a few times no longer worked as before, it now seemed almost random.

At the end of July I replaced the handset with a HTC Hero, which I paid for in cash. I had reached a point where the handset had become unusable, at one point my screen did not work for over 14 hours, so I was now in desperate need of a new handset.

I then heard that Gerry had the same issue. Remembering about the salesman having exactly the same fault, I think it’s fairly safe to establish there was a serious fault with that early batch of the model, in fact a quick Google search of the subject matter reveals many people having the same fault, all of which were fairly early adopters. Nokia seem to have acknowledged a fault, and I have read that the fix is a new screen being fitted. Did those early screens all come with a fault?

Anything else you need Ewan, give me a shout.

Matt

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I think Nokia should simply replace Matt’s 5800. Do you agree? That’s simply ridiculous. Have you had the same kind of problem with your 5800?