Once upon a time in the not so distant past at the beginning of October, I purchased a beautiful Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet. My main reason was to go more paperless and to archive handwritten notes in electronic format. However, I did not want to do so by scanning in papers or by writing on paper first and having it electronically available as I’ve been doing with my first generation LiveScribe, but by actually just writing by hand on a tablet and keeping those notes.

A couple of other tablets I’ve used could not deal well with capacitive pens and thus I could not use any of them for writing, and writing with a finger was just plain painful because I always needed to write very large and the speed wasn’t the greatest. Thus, when I stumbled upon the new Note 10″ tablet, I got really excited, and bought it when it came out in New Zealand from a tech store near me (and not through one of the web sites of parallel imports – lucky me).

It is a very beautiful device that runs the latest Android, the pen is a joy and the handwriting works very well on it. You can set it up in dual screen mode and for example watch a video on the left and take notes on the right. It is just sweet as. I know that this is not much of a review, but this post is not intended as such. Besides, I soon discovered that my new device had a deficiency: The SIM card slot wouldn’t work properly. Normally, you are supposed to be able to slot cards in and out of slots easily no matter whether they are SIM or SD cards – of course provided you put them into the correct slots. 😉 Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with my SIM card slot. I had trouble getting the SIM card in and didn’t dare to push it all the way in. When I looked more closely, I saw that a metal “something” (can’t really say whether it was a contact or something else, it looks a bit like thin wire that needs to connect with the SIM card or some such) was protruding into the space where the SIM card needed to go and actually scratched the card.

Thus, I took my device back to the store (remember: lucky me I bought it in town and not through an overseas site), they looked at it, deemed it worthy to be sent in to Samsung because it was clearly something that was not correct in the device. Unfortunately, they did not have a demonstration model with the SIM card slot in store to check whether they all had that metal thing there or whether it really was a defect. So, they shipped the tablet back to Samsung in mid-October after having ascertained that pictures of the fault weren’t enough to show the fault and after I got back from a business trip so I could wipe my data (which wasn’t much anyway). Since then I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting.

I received a couple of updates from the store letting me know that Samsung was still looking into the issue. The guys in the store have always been helpful and kept up the communication chain with Samsung. Today I went to the store for an update, and the technician told me that the device had been shipped back to the store because Samsung management (apparently it had been escalated from the Samsung service center to a management level) did not recognize the fault in the device as a manufacturing default. They said if I wasn’t happy with that decision that I could take it up myself (not through the store anymore) onto a different escalation path.

The reply makes me wonder just a tiny bit: How come that something that is attached to the inside of the device that I didn’t put there is not a device fault? I only tried to slot a SIM card in and had trouble doing so from the first second. I could not have unhinged something in there. But even if I did with a smooth SIM card that didn’t have a hook, then there is still something wrong in the device because sliding a card in and out should not suck up metal parts and make them stick into an opening that is entirely taken up by a card if the card is slid in. The part in question is not something that can fall out or that is loose by itself and can be moved. I have no idea if it can be pushed back where it’s supposed to be because I wouldn’t want to do that in order not to damage something (and I don’t have the tablet back yet). It is still firmly attached to the inside of the card slot.

It’s not yet the end because now I’m waiting for the store to send me my ticket details so I can take it along a different escalation path. I wonder what I will discover on my journey there and will keep you posted.

INTERMISSION

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