Early Nokia 5800 XMs have a major speaker defect. It’s likely to die within months

With Nokia 5800 NAM hitting the stores this week, and releases in other parts of the world planned soon, many of you must be eager to buy one, and spend a good chunk of your hard earned money on it.

Don’t. Not until you read this:

All Nokia 5800 XM handsets made before February have a major defect! They have a defective speaker that WILL die within a few months and will have to be replaced.

This fact was discovered by Mobile-review.com after spending $4500 just to buy phones, breaking 10 handsets and spending countless hours  figuring out the details. Including checking out the defective speakers under electron microscope

Nokia itself acknowledged it, but said the problem is solved now. It was a problem with the speaker supplier, which Nokia eventually replaced.

Here’s an official statement (well, a translation from Russian) from Nokia, by Vitoria Eremena, head of Nokia PR for Eurasia, to Mobile-Review:

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 (see the picture above.)

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.

It should be also noted that Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is one of our focus products, so its sales were watched carefully by our R&D department from the beginning; and, as soon as we heard about this matter, an R&D rep was dispatched to Russia to work on the problem on site.

The secondary replacement issues reported by Mobile-Review were related to the first phones and, at that moment, there was no solution to the problem, so the defective speakers were replaced with speakers from the same (at that time)  supplier. When the problem was studied more carefully and it became clear that the new speakers (from the same supplier) do not solve the problem, the supplier was changed, the plants started putting new speakers in, and service centers started getting speakers from the new supplier too. I can not name the supplier of the defective speakers, but it is a very respected company with a world-known name, whose  quality of products nobody doubted. But, unfortunately, these things happen, most likely, to everyone.

It should be emphasized that, for these kinds of quantities, and for a global company like Nokia, to solve a problem within a month is a very short time. Sure, a record number of devices were sold during December, and fewer buyers would have been faced with this problem if the sales had been lower. But please believe me, we have been seriously working on the speaker quality problem and we think that, for the moment, the problem is solved.

So, the 5800 XpressMusic can now be bought without any fears. And if you had to replace your speakers, from the end of January – everything should be all right;  if you bought the phone earlier and you have problems, now they can truly be solved in service centers by replacing the speakers.

Well, that’s about it.

And it is really an admirable case of how a vendor should solve its production problems, to which no one is immune.

Well, almost. Eldar, who originally figured all this out and is part of Mobile-Review.com, says that Nokia acknowledged the defect  at the end of January and was ready to provide the statement above to any media outlet that requested it  (why didn’t you? Probably though nobody’ll notice.)

Still, the question remains how many of the Nokia 5800 XM models, e.g. in the 5800 NAM version, are affected by the problem.

Meanwhile, here’s some advice on what to do:

• Refrain from buying your Nokia 5800 until Nokia clarifies the shipments to which countries are affected (it’s known that more than 1 million Nokia 5800XMs were shipped before Jan. 23d.) Or be ready to take the phone to service center in a few months
• If you had this problem with Nokia 5800 in Spain, Russia or some other countries, and replaced your speaker in  January, do it again.
• The only way to know when your phone was made and if it’s affected, is by its IMEI number. Service centers can tell you that, or Nokia might establish a hotline.
• With the current sales volumes, all the defective phones should be gone by April.
• Before that,  we hope Nokia will issue an official statement for those markets that are not affected

We’ll be contacting Nokia about this issue soon and report when we hear something. So stay tuned.

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Posted on 26 Feb 09 - Filed in Nokia - Comments - Written by ilinca

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