5800 XpressMusic Earpiece Problem Acknowledged by Nokia

With quite number of 5800 owners experiencing problems with the phone's earpiece, Eldar's mobile review got this official response from Nokia's PR Director for Europe & Asia, Viktoria Eremina:


All the faulty earpieces have been replaced with units produced by a different manufacturer, both those used in production models and those in the warehouses. I shall emphasize that we haven’t changed the model of the 5800 XpressMusic’s earpiece, but rather changed our supplier. It’s easy to prove since the new units look differently, which you can see in the following images.

Starting in late January all authorized service centers have been receiving packages with the new earpieces and any users who made warranty claims after that time shouldn’t experience the problem again.

It’s worth noting that the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is one of our company’s top-priority products therefore its sales have been monitored by our Research & Development (R&D) division from day one, and as soon as we found out about this defect an official representative of Nokia’s R&D department visited Russia to study the issue on-site.

Recurring warranty claims mentioned in Mobile-Review’s article started with the first phones sold in the region, as back then we didn’t have a solution, and therefore all the faulty earpieces were exchanged for the same units, which were manufactured by our previous supplier. However, as we gained a greater understanding of what the real cause of the problem was it became obvious that a simple replacement couldn’t solve the issue. I can’t name the company that made these flawed speakers, but I can say that it’s a respected and world-renowned vendor whose quality standards could not be doubted. Unfortunately, nobody is immune to these sort of mistakes.

Also, it needs to be mentioned that with the scope of the problem and Nokia’s global operations in mind, the single month that we took to deal with this issue is a very short period of time given the problem. Naturally our record-breaking sales of this phone in December led to the fact that more consumers were ultimately affected, but we have put a lot of energy and resources into rectifying this defect and we believe that it no longer poses a problem.

Therefore, we would like to assure our clients that it’s safe to buy the 5800 XpressMusic. Furthermore, if you returned your phone for repair some time after the end of January you shouldn’t run into this flaw ever again, and if you have just encountered it with your phone bought in 2008 then you can claim for repair and have the earpiece changed for a new unit.

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