AT&T Quickfire Review – DO NOT PURCHASE!

Disclaimer: This is not normally my kind of thing. I’m a pretty tolerant person of a lot of things. I understand the way business works, but this is absolutely unbelievable and I just want to warn anyone else out there before they get stuck in an AT&T contract with a non-working phone and in a bind like I currently am. I RAVE about things I love, so I feel it would be wrong not to report this big issue to my readers.

<clears throat… ahem> I spent more than 2 and a half hours dealing with AT&T’s customer service and warranty departments today, and my call was dropped twice during transfers to other departments and had to call back in. Prior to today, I spent nearly an hour last Friday with customer service troubleshooting my phone. In February we ordered a Quickfire. I wanted a phone with a QWERTY keyboard, wasn’t prepared to jump to the iPhone yet, just wanted to break into the texting/internet phones to see how much I would use these services. I did a TON of research, chose my phone carefully based on reviews and ordered. Apparently they were popular because several places were out of stock and it took a few weeks after placing the order for it to arrive. I was excited when I received it until I started Googling to find out tips & tricks on how to use it and discovered articles like this and this. Notice the dates on those articles, Feb 23 & 25th. That was within days of when my Quickfire was delivered to my doorstep. I chose not to be concerned because it was obviously only an issue IF you plugged the charger in incorrectly. A week or two after I received my phone, we received direct e-mail from AT&T to instruct us on how to use the charger properly. No big deal, right?

A few weeks ago, my Quickfire began acting up. I would press “Media Net” on the touch screen menu and “AT&T Navigator” would open, as you can see, these are no where near each other. It didn’t happen just once either. Then when I would use the touch screen to select a button, the button would change color indicating I had selected it, but would not take me to the next menu or option. I currently doesn’t register at least 10 percent of the time I select something using the touch screen. Sometimes I have to flip open the QWERTY to unfreeze the screen. Sometimes not even that works. I won’t even get into the bad software and menu/sub-menu issues. I’ll sum it up to say it takes at least 4 clicks, when the phone works as designed, to do anything because of all the sub-menus. Even more when it’s working like mine.

Even more frustrating is that many websites I try to use (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) work for a while, then when I try to fill in a form such as a login, search box, or status box, I get an error message. I know it’s not the websites or even the internet connection, because it’s the same error page and error number given regardless of website. Obviously this is not just me since they have a page dedicated to this issue on the AT&T website. I guess they think I should perform a soft reset any time I wish to tweet.

So in my adventures with customer service, after hours on the phone explaining my exact issue, troubleshooting 3 and 4 times to different representatives, I’m left with the ONLY option of getting another Quickfire “shell”. Not a new battery, just the main part of the phone. I’m told I have a “first generation” and their have been software upgrades. WTH? I’ve been using the on screen menu to desperately try to check for “software upgrades”.  I’m told that function doesn’t work and that I have to shut my phone off completely every few days in order to make sure I get all upgrades sent out via their towers. What’s even more frustrating is that other AT&T users have publicly via internet and AT&T’s own forums said they were given options to trade for other brands of phones, but even when asking every person I talked with today (which is probably in the ballpark of 6 or 7 representatives of varying levels of authority) no one could authorize this. I hope I just have a “bad phone” like they all tried to tell me, but from what I’m reading online, it’s not just me.

I get the feeling AT&T is trying to get these bad phones off their shelves, as they have recently begun selling them again for the low, low price of $29 after rebate. We paid about $100 for our phone and were supposed to get a rebate, but never received the rebate form for it. Big surprise, eh? If these phones we no longer for sale, you never would have heard a peep, tweet or seen a word of me speaking against them. I tried to do the right thing, follow their procedures, but in the end I got nothing. One “manager” told me I could get a $60 service credit OR talk with the warranty department to see about a replacement. I need a phone that will actually make phone calls, and if mine quits doing that in the next month, the $60 credit isn’t going to do me a bit of good, so I took the logical option.

If anyone from AT&T happens to read this, feel free to contact me. I’d be more than happy to clear this up. All I want is the option to walk into an AT&T store and pick out a new phone that will meet my needs without the extra $78 “early upgrade” or “exception upgrade” fee I’d be charged. Come on, you know it was a bad phone, you pulled it off the shelves for a while. Do the right thing AT&T and allow those of us with bad phones a chance to swap for a good one. Right now even a Jitterbug looks better than my Quickfire. If you found me by Googling Quickfire Review… take my advice. Pick another phone… ANY phone. Heck, while you are at it, pick a carrier that knows the meaning of “customer service”.  <steps down off soapbox>