Recently my weekend morning started a little differently. As usual I wanted to check my phone (I know its a bad habit but yeah many times I do check my Whatsapp messages, mails and other stuffs like that) and for some reason it just switched off and then never started. I had bought phone couple of years back for hefty sum of 37000 that too in three monthly installments. It was a Samsung Note II and as the Samsung software was too slow I moved to stable version of Cyanogenmod. So I am not sure if Cyanogenmod killed my phone but it is now laying somewhere in my cupboard useless.I tried that whole weekend to do something with the phone as it was booting till bootloader and then was getting stuck. Little google search I came across something called “SDS” meaning Sudden Death Syndrome which is as it sounds just like that one fine day the phone just dies and lot of Samsung Note II has been a like this. SDS is caused due to a problem with eMMC chip which is a non-volatile memory that stores a copy of OS and actually is the internal memory of 16GB that you normally see.
After trying it myself I went out to couple of mobile phone repair stores and they claimed it can be corrected. All of them tried but nothing worked and it was kind of waste of time. All these guys never told me what they were doing and they normally take it inside and probably connect to a JTAG flasher device but since the main memory was already corrupted it wouldn’t detected. One of the better shops started saying that if I am ready to spend around 10K it can be corrected without any guarantee. I was not willing to spend so much and just came back and ordered Moto X Play on Flipkart (I am again sad here coz I am so used to these phones that couldn’t stay without it, I could manage with my Nokia 1100 for only couple of days).
I got into a little bit of thinking after all this and as I come from the hardware background I do understand that there is definitely a salvage value for such devices. You can search online for such companies where you can sell old phone and one such company ReGlobe that offered me a sum of “Zero” as they were doing the service of recycling e-waste.
I know if the eMMC memory can be replaced it may work fine for another some time. 16GB eMMC device used on a Samsung Note 2 shouldn’t cost more than $40 which may be a good investment to revive the phone. So there is a pain here but is it worth solving. Would people interested in getting a high end phone repaired which is very costly in any manufacturer’s authorized service center.
Will transparency and good quality in service actually bring people to a company that helps with a detailed report of what went wrong and how much labor and resources were spent with a 30% margin for overheads and profits.
This can be taken to things other than phone like Washing Machine, TV, Microwave, Refrigerator and any other stuff which goes bad and mostly servicing companies do a complete module replacement which is either borne by manufacturer when product is in warranty or by the user otherwise.
Let me know what you think about this 🙂