[Jackalo]

I'm glad that I remembered about this thread. I bought my Touch Pro from BestBuy when it was first released (before the Sprint store even carried it), and had the chrome crack in the first week, but never really cared about it until recently, but not even for that reason.

My Touch Pro began freezing every second or third day to the point where I had to hard reset it everytime. It became a guessing game as to whether or not my alarms on the phone would wake me up for work or not. I've used lots of different firmwares on it, and even tried going back to stock and relocking to see if it'd cure the problem, but it didn't, so eventually I decided to go into a local Sprint corporate store to go about getting the phone replaced, as I had the Total Equipment Protection package.

Not only was the sales person rude (probably because I wasn't buying anything), but once he noticed the cracked chrome, he told me that user abuse wasn't covered. I tried to explain to him that it was a common problem, and that there was even an internal Sprint memo about it, but this guy thought I was just making it up. Fair enough, he had probably only started working there a few months ago, well after the memo came out. He eventually agreed to let the techs look at it, but told me that I'd have to leave my phone there until the problem reproduced itself. When I asked about getting a temp phone in the mean time, he flat out told me no. Unacceptable. I took my phone and left.

Once I got home, I decided to dig up this thread and then email eCare about it. Their response that cracked chrome was considered user abuse and would not be covered by TEP for a free exchange, and suggested that I contact the warranty group to pay the $100 deductible to get it replaced. Again, not cool.

I finally decided to call up *2 Customer Service, and once I explained the situation to the person on the other end of the phone, and mentioned an internal memo from January with my serial number being in that range, they took a few minutes to find/review the memo, and then told me that a brand new phone was being overnighted to me.

Their Customer Service has gotten a LOT better. It's a shame that the in store experience and eCare haven't caught up yet. I only say that about eCare because they have never really been helpful for me.

Whenever I get the replacement, I'll take some photos of my old phone and the (hopefully) new one in the box. Again, thanks to everyone for this thread. It saved me $100 on something that should've been covered by the Sprint TEP that I pay for.