This one is a win for me and for common sense/logic. I have a 21 month old S4 which is most definitely showing its age. Heavily cracked midframe, new battery cover (side clips on the old one wore out) and a slowly delaminating screen in two different places (high drop onto concrete without a case about 12 months ago). While a much battered phone the viewable screen is still pristine and until very recently everything worked brilliantly. I then began to have symptoms of a main board failure (intermittent sim card failure to read) and thought the end was nigh.

My phone has been rooted since day one and running custom roms very shortly after. I backed everything up, wiped it and flashed the stock firmware before taking my phone back to my local carrier’s store. They quite happily accepted it and sent me on my way with a loan phone (note to self, google account 2-factor authentication doesn’t work on Jelly Bean or earlier…). At this point I was sure they’d find some way to reject the repair as a phone used as much as mine must surely have some form of water damage, let alone the physical damage to the exterior, or the tripped knox flag. However, I was notified today that after dropping it off last Thursday afternoon it was on the way back and likely in my hands again on Wednesday.

I had at no point expected them to take the damage at face value, especially on a nearly two year old phone that was only barely within the warranty period. Not only that I never expected to have it back, repaired, within a week. I was very pleasantly surprised by the result and had my faith restored somewhat, especially since it took two weeks to diagnose my S4’s heavily swollen battery as a manufacturer fault shortly after first purchasing it…

Brilliant service from Telelogistics and amazingly fast. Even the CS rep I contacted via their generic email address got back to me within an hour. Based on past experiences this was highly unexpected, though most appreciated.


Lee

Note:
I am definitely looking forward to getting back to Lollipop 5.1.1, this trip back to Jelly Bean (initially Gingerbread!!) was an unwelcome reminder on how far android has come over the last few years.
Also, two factor authentication failure on earlier OS versions shows up as an incorrect password. Hugely frustrating to figure out what the problem was, chalk that one up to a lesson learned the hard way as I repeatedly attempted to enter my difficult to type complex password...