I should have listened to Nickel [1] right away when he sent me an email to get a nice case for my Sprint Centro. Unfortunately, it went into my to-do pile and I just haven’t gotten around to it.
My 3 month old Sprint Palm Centro Broke [2]
I’m not exactly sure how it happened. It just kept trying to hot sync (a feature I don’t use) and then finally shut down for good. It may have had something to do with my 8 month old slobbering all over it… but I’m not really sure.
Warranty
Since the phone is under warranty you can have Palm replace it for free. However, when I called, after over an hour, I determined it would take longer than a month; I wasn’t sure if it would actually be replaced or not.
I decided to go to our local Sprint repair shop. They replaced it with a refurbished phone for $55. It took 3 business days. You can usually save money with refurbished electronics [3].
Insurance Plan
Of course, the upsell for the insurance plan was strong.
Here’s the math, $7 month on 2 lines would be $168 per year. So I could replace our phones 3 times during the year and come out ahead. I’m not seeing where the value is.
I explained my profession to him and reminded the salesman that insurance was for catastrophic losses only. He told me that “someone going without their cell phone for a couple days is catastrophic.” Wow!
I said thanks but I’ll take my chances. I see that I can buy a used one on eBay or craigslist for around $100 if the refurbished ones aren’t available after my one year warranty.
Lessons Learned
I will do a better job taking care of my phone. I’ve always had the cheap free phones until now. I’ll get a case and I will treat it more like our camera (which I am very careful with). Ironically, I have a blackberry too, with a hard case and I have never had a problem with it!
Do you take the cell phone insurance?