According to mobile maniac Eldar Murtazin of Mobile-Review, Nokia is in for a world of hurt as more than one million 5800 XpressMusic handsets currently in the hands of users may be defective. Ouch. Long story short: Muratzin bought 10 5800XMs a while back and the speakers died within a few months — on all of them! He began to investigate the matter and, in the process, got Nokia Eurasia’s head of PR to fess up to the issue. Apparently Nokia’s original speaker supplier turned out to be a dud. Nokia switched as soon as it could but 5800XM handsets made before February likely have the defective speakers in them. So in other words, the 5800 NAM is finally here but you might want to think twice before purchasing one until Nokia Europe and Nokia US have an official statement on this, which will hopefully be ASAP. If you already have a 5800, your local Nokia customer care line should be able to tell you if your handset is affected based on your IMEI. Hit the jump for the purported statement from Vitoria Eremena, head of Nokia PR for Eurasia courtesy of 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.
[Via UV]
