Physical Damage
What can cause physical damage?
Is it always visible?
It can be extremely frustrating when your phone stops working. But it is not always due to a manufacturing issue.
Mobile phones are generally designed to withstand wear and tear and are normally quite tough, however, physical damage can occur through everyday use and, whether intentional or not, will void your warranty. Take charging your phone for example. If the cable is not inserted or removed correctly, the connector can be damaged, or bent and your warranty voided.
Here are a few other things that may cause your phone’s warranty to be void due to physical damage.
A handset dropped on to a hard surface can jar components from the circuit board and crack sensitive devices (LCD screen), which voids manufacturer and extended warranties. In some cases, physical damage is not externally visible.
Excessive dust and dirt can have a detrimental effect to PCBs and components. Phones should be kept away from dusty, dirty conditions.
Chewed or twisted antennas and heavily scratched or damaged casings can badly affect the protection the casings provide, allowing in dirt and moisture. Badly damaged casings and outer plastics can be deemed out of warranty.
Our Tips
To help protect your phone from physical damage, follow our tips below to assist with keeping your phone in a warranty condition:
- Use a protective cover or pouch
- Don’t throw your phone around
- Don’t force the charger into the connector
- Avoid putting the phone in your back pocket, or front shirt pocket
- Avoid extremely dusty or dirty conditions
Liquid Damage
What is liquid damage?
How does it happen?
Everyone knows that water and electrical products don’t go well together. But just how much is needed to kill your phone or void your warranty?
There are numerous scenarios where moisture/liquid can contaminate a phone. Even trace amounts of liquid will cause the board and circuitry to become permanently damaged. The phone does not necessarily have to be splashed, soaked or immersed in liquid to be damaged, excessive humidity and slight moisture can be just as dangerous to the circuitry.
Here are a few things that will enable moisture to affect your phone
Using your phone in the rain exposes liquid to areas where moisture can enter a handset; data connector, charging port, antenna, headset jack, keypad, SD card slots, microphone and speaker holes and the screen.
Liquids that can damage your phone are not restricted to water. Any liquid, including chemicals, will cause damage to the circuit board and components. Some liquids will cause the damage more quickly than others.
Places that are steamy or have a high humidity level, such as the bathroom when you shower, will allow moisture to permeate through all available entry points in your phone. You may not even see any signs of moisture on the phone.
Our Tips
To help protect your phone from liquid damage, follow our tips below to assist with keeping your phone in a warranty condition:
- Use a protective cover or pouch
- Use a dry cloth to clean the screen
- Avoid using your phone in the rain unless under cover
- Avoid taking your phone into rooms where there will be a lot of steam
- Keep your phone in a dry bag when at the beach or on the boat
Battery Life
Battery drains quickly?
How to maximise its life?
There are several reasons why the battery on your phone may drain quickly, and potentially shorten the battery’s life.
Obviously, the more you use the phone, and the more features of it you use, the faster the battery will drain. But what you may not know is that a weak network signal can also affect your battery performance.
Here are a few other things that may cause your battery to drain quickly.
Setting the LCD brightness high, or using the phone with the screen on for prolonged periods of time will drain your battery.
Applications that require data connections (online games, email, youtube) will drain your battery faster. Even when they are not open, applications will continue to run and use data connections if they need to.
Using bluetooth, wifi or GPS will affect the length of time your battery lasts. If there isn’t an available connection the phone will continually search for one.
Software & Data
Apps not working?
Software crashing?
Software plays an important part on how your phone operates which is why it is important to understand the common things that can affect the performance of your phone’s software.
With the rapid increase in their functionality, mobile phones have also become cameras, portable computers, games consoles, and multi-media communications tools. With add-on apps and large amounts of data being stored on them there is an increasing risk of software conflicts and performance issues.
Here are a few things that can affect your phones performance.
Jail-breaking or Rooting your phone by installing software that is not approved by your network operator voids warranty and may cause your phone to crash or affect its’ ability to connect to the network.
Not all apps available for download will be compatible with your phone or software version. They may cause freezing, crashing or slow performance.
Allowing the internal memory on your phone to reach maximum capacity will slow down your phone’s operating system potentially causing it to freeze
Our Tips
If you are experiencing problems with your phones software, follow our tips below to improve its performance:
- Always back-up the data on your phone to your computer, Cloud storage or save to an external memory card
- Do not allow your phones internal memory to reach capacity and set it to save to the external memory instead
- Only upgrade software to your phone that is approved by the manufacturer and for your network operator
- Delete apps that crash as they are most likely not compatible with your phone
- Reset your phone by doing a hard reset, or by removing the battery; waiting 30 seconds and then reinserting the battery
- Most phones have the options under settings to allow a factory reset. This will restore your phone to factory default settings. Make sure you first back-up your data!
While these tips may be helpful, there are several factors that could also influence the performance of your phones software. Please refer your phone to your service centre if you experience on-going software problems.
Dropped Calls
Why do my calls keep
cutting out mid sentence?
Dropped calls can be frustrating but there are several reasons why calls sometimes cut off.
Mobile phones have a network strength icon that indicates how strong the signal is between the network and the handset. A full signal bar would indicate a strong connection with the network but one or two bars would indicate weak network connection. The weaker the network strength, the more likely you will experience a dropped call.
Here are a few things that may cause the weak signal on your handset.
The further away you are from a base station, the harder the phone has to work to ensure a good connection is maintained, which could cause the signal bar to fluctuate.
Rural areas are likely to have weak network coverage while urban areas are known for having good network coverage.
Using an external antenna sometimes in a car kit may affect the signal performance of the phone if inserted incorrectly.
Our Tips
If you are experiencing dropped calls on your phone, follow our tips below for improving call performance:
- Check the network signal before making a call, coverage maps are available online for each of the networks
- Concrete & steel can interfere with the network, going outside may improve call quality
- If you’re in a weak coverage area, try making the call with the loudspeaker
- Use an external aerial if you are constantly in weak network coverage areas, if your phone has that capability
- If your calls continually drop while in a good coverage areas, you may need to get the phone checked out in case it has a fault