14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia managed to send out into the wild a nice range of defective handsets. The company's highly expected Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone is reported to have been packed with a faulty speaker, one that will crash within few months of usage, requiring a replacement.
The problem is not an isolated one, but a major issue. According to the reports, all the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic handsets that have been manufactured before February come with that major defect. The company has confirmed the problem with the device, and newer phones do not include it; however, it blames the speaker supplier for all the mess.
The phone manufacturer made the following official statement (which is translated from Russian): “The problematic speakers were replaced with speakers from another supplier, both in production and warehouses. I’d like to emphasize that we have replaced not only the speakers but also their supplier, i.e. at the moment we use speakers from the new supplier at our manufacturing plants, as well as in our service centers. It is very easy to confirm this, because the new speakers are visually different.”
Vitoria Eremena, head of Nokia PR for Eurasia, sent the above words to Mobile-Review, which discovered the problem after testing 10 handsets and spending a lot of time figuring out the details of the issue. According to Vitoria Eremena, “Service centers started receiving the new speakers during the last decade of January, so all users who replaced the speakers since then shouldn’t face this problem.”
According to the PR representative, the company's R&D department looked closely into Nokia 5800 XpressMusic to figure out the issue. The solution Nokia has come up with implies replacing the faulty speakers with new ones, made by another producer. The company did not unveil the name of the supplier that provided the faulty chips, only stated that it had been changed.
Nokia does not expect to be able to solve the problem within a few months’ time, given the large number of devices that have been shipped all around the world. As many of you might already know, the company managed to sell over one million Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phones already, and it is also preparing the launch of the device in the United States.
For the time being, it is still uncertain how many of the devices are affected by this issue. Those who would like to go for the phone might want to wait a little longer, until Nokia announces that the problem is definitely solved.
At the same time, those who experienced issues with the phone's speaker and replaced it in January should consider doing it again, since the good parts only came up in February. Those who would like to learn if their handsets are faulty or not should check the phone's IMEI number. According to Mobile-Review, all the defective handsets are expected to be replaced by April. Hopefully, Nokia will also make an official statement regarding the issue, so as to also inform users which markets are affected and which are not.
