One Step Forward

Regular readers will know that I purchased a Microsoft Surface RT earlier this year when I was let down by the self destruction of my Google Nexus 7.  For those who haven't read all of my posts, here's an abridged bitch about how I ended up spending £400 on the Microsoft machine.

I was given the Nexus for my birthday last year, just after it was launched and to be honest it was a good machine.  It went everywhere with me - which is reasonable as it is a portable tablet.  I do have a generic case for it, but often it was carried around naked in my jeans pockets - did I mention it was pocket sized as well as portable?  Anyway, after a not too taxing bimble around the Lake District earlier this year I pulled my Nexus out of a side pocket to while away a few moments while crossing a lake on a steamer when I realised that somewhere along the way the screen had spontaneously self destructed, cracked from arsehole to breakfast time.

A quick search on the internet using my wife's iPhone revealed that this was a fairly common experience.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, Asus (manufacturer) will only consider looking at such damage if the owner parts with £50 and will only refund that if it decides (without arbitration) that the fault is a manufacturing one.  If they throw the bones down and decide it is user induced, they keep the money and offer to repair at an exorbitant cost.  Somewhere between the cost of a new Nexus and the ticket price on a Virgin Galactic flight.

So I decided to walk away from Google branded equipment and bought a Surface RT instead, hoping to find that replacement screens and digitisers come down in price in the near future.  I'm still waiting, and the near future is now a distant memory. As an aside, while in Boston, MA the other week I came across a stall in a mall offering to repair a variety of broken screens on iPhones, iPads, Galaxies, other machines.  Average price seemed to be about $60 all in.  I spoke with the young man at the stall to ask if they repaired the Nexus - I didn't have it with me, why would I take a broken tablet on vacation?  Anyhow, said young man pulled a pained expression when I asked if the Nexus could be repaired - he answered yes and started to fiddle with some spares he'd been collecting together, not really making eye contact.  How much? I asked.  About $200, he replied.  And he agreed that you could buy a brand new 16GB Nexus 7 for much the same amount, he just couldn't do anything about the price.  So if you're in the market for a pocket sized portable tablet then by all means consider the Nexus, just don't expect it to be portable or suitable for putting in your pocket.

Anyway, I bought the RT and it's been very good in general - it does have a habit of installing updates and rebooting without warning - we're talking Microsoft here remember - and I have had a few occasions when it didn't want to wake up at all, eventually rebooting.  Either it's a teenager, I'm interrupting an unannounced update or I've an intermittent fault on my machine.  On the upside, I've typed around 50,000 words on the snap-on keyboard and it's still working like brand new.  Outside of authors I suspect most users won't use the keyboard as aggressively.

But Windows 8 is far from perfect, so Microsoft have been working feverishly on a new version, Windows 8.1. Highlights are a Start button (I can't get too worked up about that - it lets you toggle between the old desktop and the new tiled interface, so what?).  It does allow unlimited web pages to be viewed by your machine - I expect there is a limit, but the current limit is way too small and the random culling of web pages is a little irritating, although the pinning facility means they are relatively easy to restore.  You can view up to four web pages side by side with the new OS, which is likely to be a little challenging on an RT screen, but useful on an extended screen.  Two pages maximum on the RT is considered the maximum that is practical.  It also allows a 50:50 split on screen - Windows 8 allows a 1/3:2/3 split, which has it's place but is often not a great choice.

Perhaps the biggest update is the inclusion of Outlook to complement the existing Office 365 that gets bundled in for free. 

So, what's the catch?  Well it seems that Microsoft pulled the upgrade off its store within 24 hours of launch.  There are a few sites out there that obtained the code to download but the way I look at this is if Microsoft are worried enough to pull the OS so soon after launch, why would I want to risk messing my machine about.  Plus some of the instructions to upgrade take me back to my maths degree - if you've got to resort to coding just to upgrade a piece of software then something is seriously wrong.

The upgrade sounds like it could be worthwhile, but I'm going to hold fire until I hear that Microsoft have re-launched the OS and then I'll let it stabilise, maybe 48 hours this time.

And the Nexus?  Well,  I'm convinced I'll get it up and running, it just may find itself in a different housing with a different function.  I'll canvas those inventive persons at B L O'Feld Megalomaniac Industries, I'm sure they will have a few evil suggestions that will make Google sit up.

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Enough to Make Me Screen

I reported a little while back about the unfortunate discovery I made when on holiday in the Lake District.  After a day out walking on a relatively mild trek - honest there are some easy bimbles up there - I took my Nexus 7 out of my side pocket to find the screen cracked from arsehole to breakfast time, as a wise man once said.

The front screen image looked fine, apart from the cracks criss-crossing it.  That and the stubborn refusal to let me enter the four digit PIN to unlock it.  I took it home and while I fumed for a few days I was rewarded with the constant sounds of emails and updates popping in and of calendar diary date alerts ringing, at least until the battery ran down.

I looked up the website of the company that had sold us the Nexus, PC World, where I found the number to ring regarding warranty issues.  After ten minutes of automated choices that never actually seemed to address what I was looking for I ended up on the selection that related to Asus products.  Luckily for me I knew the Nexus was an Asus product, because I'd still be making selections now if I'd been waiting for the automated voice to suggest Google.

So I made the selection and was advised, in level automated tones, that Asus warranty claims were handled by Asus themselves.  An eleventeen digit phone number blasted out and I found myself listening to the dial tone.  Now the Asus number isn't a free phone number and although it counts as a local rate number on a landline, it costs an undisclosed amount per minute on a mobile.  Probably not a huge amount, but it doesn't half feel like being held to ransom.  Oh, and their office hours are more reasonable than mine so I had to stack early to get home in time to call them.

The young man I spoke with was very helpful.  He listened to my tale and didn't even snigger, let alone accuse me of lying. We went through a pointless exercise while I tried to identify a number he insisted I had to be able to read before I could register a claim.  Apparently it's written on a transparent sticker on the reverse near the speakers and the letters are only marginally less transparent than the sticker itself, as well as being infinitesimally tiny.  Anyway, we agreed that was  something I could do later using a scanning electron microscope - I'm sure I saw one in the shed the other day when I was tidying up - so we got down to basics.

Here's how it works. First I register with Asus on their website - that's why I need that number - then they arrange for someone to pick the Nexus up, hopefully at a time more accessible than their helpline opening hours.  The Nexus is sent to an independent repairer who decides whether the repair is a warranty item or, in their opinion, user inflicted damage.  If they decide it's a warranty repair then they'll do it, but if they decide it's my fault then I have two choices - first to pay for a repair, cost unknown but expected to be in the region of £150, about the price of a new Nexus.  Alternatively I can have the Nexus back, unrepaired and £50 lighter for the privilege.

So I've been back to PC World and after a flurry of emails got to speak to a human who didn't sound too interested in my tale to be fair.  Anyway, probably in an attempt to get me off the line he told me to take the Nexus to my local PC World store to access the 'Knowhow' technicians to have the device evaluated.  If they agreed it was a warranty repair then they'd phone a number and maybe start a ball or two rolling.  So this evening I popped into the local store and found two men behind the counter, an older guy serving a customer and a young man.  To be fair to the young man, he listened to my tale without interrupting, but then made a point of stating that they weren't technicians and he'd have to send the Nexus off to Asus for a determination anyway. Knowhow? Know nothing, more like.

Anyway the older guy had overheard enough and he popped over to help his colleague out.  Seemingly they've had loads of these - shouldn't that be telling somebody something? - and he said that every one they sent to Asus came back unrepaired with a £50 bill attached.  His advice - walk away.

So I've been trawling the internet for replacement screens, and guess what, it's a minefield.  First off, you can buy the LCD screen (which may not be damaged on my Nexus) or the digitiser, the transparent device that sits on top of the LCD screen and works out what your grubby fingers are mauling at.  That's probably what's gone south on my machine, in my opinion.  Or you can buy both in one unit.

Before you even start bidding on eBay for any of these - and by the way, there's a heck of a lot of Nexus 7s with cracked screens for sale on there for spares or repair - take yourself off to YouTube.  There's a number of videos on there showing you how to replace your screen and you might be a little surprised to find that it's not the most straightforward of jobs.  There's at least one very detailed video on there - it's been viewed almost 100,000 times for goodness sake - that shows you in very fine detail how to do this task, including each and every Philips screw removal - and there are quite a lot of those.  The bottom line is that you go in through the back, and no, that isn't euphemism.  it's like a plastic surgeon doing your nose job from the rear of your skull, but there you go.

Anyway I watched this very detailed video - nine minutes to get to the screen assembly - and then it started reassembly without showing how to separate the digitiser from the LCD screen, which was a shame as I'd just found a digitiser for sale for about £22 including P&P from Hong Kong.  So I did a bit more digging and it seems that although you can buy the LCD and digitiser separately, they are fused together on the Nexus.  As is the front cover, although there are various reports that the cover can be removed by judicious heating with a hair dryer. Or a hammer and chisel, you takes your choice.

So, there's a bit more to this than meets the eye and just buying relatively inexpensive components may not result in a working Nexus, but will probably just result in you being even more out of pocket.  I'm going to fix this device, of that I'm sure, but I'm going to have to dig around a fair bit further .  I'll keep you all posted, but it's on the back burner until the price of spares drops or the UK performs an economic miracle.  So don't hold your breath - it's bad enough being held responsible for self cracking screens.

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Nexus 7 - Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

I've just paid a flying visit to Ambleside, in the Lake District.  Regular readers will know that I rate this part of the country very highly and Ambleside in particular.  The occasion was a visit to Zefferelllis Jazz Bar to listen to a blues band and to take in a few strolls in the countryside.  As is my habit I popped my Nexus 7 in a side pocket and had a full day of strolling around Lake Windermere.  I've travelled many miles with the Nexus carried in this manner - it's one of the attractions of a pocket sized tablet is that it fits in a pocket.

Anyway, on the last leg of the day, heading back to Ambleside on a lake ferry, I pulled the Nexus out of my pocket to read an eBook and found the screen cracked in multiple places and the device unresponsive - it turned on but the touchscreen didn't work so I couldn't unlock the device.  Basically it's just showing my background photo and the PIN keyboard.  I've rotated the device through 360 and tried the keyboard on all four rotations - nothing doing.

Back in Ambleside I Googled the fault using my wife's iPad and it appears that it isn't that uncommon.  In fact, if you follow the message boards from product launch to today you'll find a couple of trends.  Initially the main problems appeared to be around light leakage from the body, put down to loose screws holding the back away from the front.  Then the screen cracking reports started appearing.  Now they seem to be the main complaint about the Nexus 7 and by all accounts I've been quite lucky getting nearly nine months out of mine.

Of course you've got to take the reports with a bit of caution - devices that haven't had a fault of any kind won't have generated the kind of report we're talking about, and the Nexus does appear to have been a fairly successful product.  So it's difficult to decide how big a problem this is.  However there are some common threads filtering through and one, worryingly, is that the screen is not covered by the warranty.  The other, and I've verified this through searches on Google and sites such as eBay, is that the screens are expensive to replace. In fact, to pay ASUS, the manufacturer of the Nexus, to repair it costs about the same as buying a new device according to many reports.  From instructions posted by techies it also looks to be quite a problematical task as well, which is possibly one reason why ASUS levies such a high labour charge.

I contacted the store I bought the Nexus from, PC World on-line.  I say contacted, I mean I listened to a series of menu choices and when I got to the bit that referred to ASUS products I received a phone number and a suggestion that I should really phone them.  Did I not hear them, put the bloody phone down, why don't you?

So I phoned ASAS.  Here's a thing - calls have to be between 0900 and 1700 and cost at least 5 pence a minute on a BT landline, an undefined amount on a mobile, no idea about over the employer's VOIP.  So an early stack and back at home I worked my way through another menu - eight choices to listen to and I still got it wrong.  For anyone going through this, choose the EEE option, which I think is option 2.  There I spoke to a polite man who explained how it works.  First you need to find the serial number on the Nexus - I'm still looking.  It's on the transparent sticker at the bottom of the device on the back and the writing is both miniscule and virtually as transparent as the sticker.

I explained the situation and he said that if it was assessed to be user damage my warranty wouldn't cover the repair, but if it wasn't my fault, it would.  That sounds reasonable, so I asked for what to do next, apart from using a scanning electron microscope to read the serial number.  Well, it seems you log onto the ASUS repair web page, apparently UK.ASUS.com/RMA and fill in a form.  After a few days you receive instructions on how to courier the device to their authorised repairers who will make an assessment on who is to blame.  By the way, this isn't a conversation, let alone a debate.  They decide and that's that.  If they determine that it is a warranty repair you'll get your device back and working within a month or so.  If it isn't a warranty repair then you can have it repaired - cost currently unknown apart from rumours on the web, but expected to be about the cost of a new device, or you can have the damaged item back.  However if you take the damaged item back you do have to pay for the courier and the labour charges which are estimated to be about £50.  And you agree to this as soon as you fill in that form and start the ball rolling, so you may find yourself having to choose to pay the price of a new Nexus to get a repaired Nexus, or a third of the price of a new Nexus to get an inoperative model back.

I did speak to my household insurance and they're quite happy to cover this item for accidental damage, even when I told them that I didn't believe I'd damaged it.  But I do have a £150 excess on accidental damage claims, so it hardly seems worth it as that's the price of q new Nexus 7.

Whatever happens over the Nexus I'm certain that I'll be without it for a while - the repairs seem to take weeks according to many reports, and I'll likely only be doing that if it's agreed that it is a warranty repair.  In the meantime I've picked up a Microsoft Surface RT with a tactile keyboard so that will be my go-to tablet from now on.  It's day three and I'm still getting to grips with the new Windows methodology, but it's clearly a versatile machine  A first impressions report in tomorrow's blog.


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