Hello, New poster here, I usually read the forums without participating but have had a rather poor experience and wanted to know if this is the norm.

Recently I had an accident with my phone and decided to get a new iPhone 7 from the Vodafone online store, this process was smooth right up until the new phone arrived and would not power on.

(Note that I work in IT, and have so for over 15 years, so naturally I worked through all the typical fixes to get the phone to turn on - no dice. Unfortunately at this point I had already applied a rather expensive screen protector as soon as I took the phone out of the box, should have tested the phone first, I know, but why would I assume a brand-new phone wouldn’t turn on?)

Next step, I took it into my local Vodafone store, they were extremely helpful, but could not replace the phone as they did not stock the model.

They then phoned the online store support team and gave them the details about the dead phone and asked them to also to reimburse me for the screen protector, they then passed me over to the rep on the phone who then told me that the phone would need to be sent to them for assessment. I was advised that this could take up to 2 weeks!

As I have worked in IT retail this came as a surprise to me - we would never do this for a brand-new device that was DOA, we would always replace it immediately/forward replace it for the customer and then RMA the device ourselves.

The staff at the store packaged up the DOA iPhone 7 and shipped it off for me, they also offered a loan phone, but I was able to use my existing (damaged) phone.

It is now over a week later and I have made several calls to Vodafone to follow up on the status but have had no additional information aside from confirmation that they received it last Friday.

If this scenario was different, say I had the phone for several months and it stopped working, I would feel that this is reasonable, but this was a brand-new purchase that was dead in the box - so far this has been a terrible experience.