The Xoom Saga

Back towards the beginning of the year, I purchased my good lady wife a new tablet computer.  She'd been using a cheapie 7" one for a while, but it was not very well supported, on an old version of Android, and a little heavy.  But it was cheap, and it worked, and I hadn't wanted to spend too much because we've a house full of gadgets that get played with just once...

Anyway, the cheap tablet was a success, so come birthday time, I bought her a new one.  After reading around, and doing the whole budget versus features thing, opted for a Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition.  Slightly bigger screen, but thinner and lighter, and much more responsive.  It cost me about £330 via Amazon (yes I did shop around, that was the best I could find it at the tieme) and she loved it.

Three months down the line, though, a slight reluctance to charge properly had turned into a complete refusal.  If you held the cable just so you could get the charge light on, but it didn't seem to actually take it. Obviously it was faulty, and presumably something loose around the usb/charging socket, despite us taking care with it all the time - I've come across enough laptops with damaged power connectors to ensure we're careful on that score.

So I tried talking to the original seller.  They told me to send it to Motorola under guarantee, which I did. They just sent it back with a rather vague "internal damage, outside warranty" report.  When I called them they were equally vague, said it must mean it would cost more to repair than it was worth.  Now we didn't damage it, so it must have arrived like that, but the seller wasn't having any of it.   Despite having the Sale of Goods act on my side, they blanket refused to do anything.  Amazon weren't any help either; the seller had already stopped selling anything through them, so I suspect that there was little they could do anyway.

I'm still considering going through the credit card company, or maybe a small claims against the seller, but it's all my word against theirs it seems. At worst, I could claim it on the house insurance, but there's a £100 excess on that!

In the meantime, I'm stuck with a dead tablet and a frustrated wife - going back to the old tablet was pretty hard work by now, and despite the cost coming down, it'd still be over £200 to buy an identical replacement...   so, who you gonna call?.  ACR Limited, in Heywood.  No simple board-swappers this lot, they actually fix things like proper engineers should!  My last employer used them for laptop repairs, and I'd had them look at a laptop of mine last year (it was too far gone, so they didn't charge me anything) so thought I'd let them look at this.  Despite never having seen one before, they managed to find the parts to fix it, and it cost me less than the insurance excess and substantially less than buying a replacement.

So, this post is really just to recommend them for if you have anything computer related that's broken, not just laptops!