My 2015-vintage Samsung Note 3 has an unhealthy charging port (contact pads getting thin, I think), and a repair shop tells me that the charging port is attached to an expensive part in a way that makes it impractical to replace the cheap part separately. So it looks like I'll need a new phone before much longer.
I was at Town Center anyway, so I walked to this store (which has moved a block south of its location last time I was there). I was helped by a young guy with short, blondish hair. (I didn't think to peek at his name tag.) He offered help, let me loose to look at new phones, then offered help again the moment I looked like I was done browsing.
I asked about some of the phones I had looked at, and he described differences (in very general terms, as a starting point) between the various phones offered. One major point he noted (pun intended) was that my Note 3 has a stylus, and only a few phones (current Note models, a few other brands) have stylus support. He asked whether I wanted to keep stylus support; I replied that I mostly use it for easier typing than big fingers on small on-screen "buttons". I asked whether I could use a stylus on other phones if I didn't need a stylus holder; he said that I could, but only with certain kinds of stylus.
I also asked about the possibility of fixing my charging port without the whole expensive part, and he suggested two repair companies (other than my old stand-by, JCD Repair), and gave me a business card for one.
When I asked about other differences between the high-end (expensive) phones and basic (lower cost) phones, he said that the fancy ones were faster, had more memory, more storage, etc. I said that the limiting factor for my phone seems more often to be connection speed, and that led him to a different topic: new phone communications bands ("LTE 700" or "Band 12") have come into use since my old phone was a new, high-end model. Even the basic models have all the latest communications bands, so they're likely to have stronger signals and fewer dead zones than my Note 3. That's a very useful distinction.
I asked about more details of differences between various models, and he said that present-day basic models are probably as powerful as my formerly high-end phone in terms of computing. Between the added communications bands and advances in computing power, I might be able to upgrade for pretty cheap.
I observed that there weren't any real mid-range phones between the basic and high-end models, and asked about the possibility of getting an unlocked mid-range phone somewhere else. He said I could do that, but I'd need to make sure it was compatible with T-Mobile, used "LTE 700". He recommended a web site named "GSM Arena" as a place to do that sort of research. I thanked him for helping me with something that might not result in a sale at that store, and he said his job was to make sure I got the right phone, not that I bought it there. (I suppose that as long as I keep paying T-Mobile carrier fees, he's doing his job.)
That's really good customer service.
I was in the store late on a Wednesday morning. There were two employees, and only one other customer, who left during my conversation with a sales guy. Quite a few of the negative reviews of this location (which appear to carry over from when the shop was a block to the north) complain about crowd control, but crowds were definitely not a problem for me. I may bump this review up to five stars if it looks like they've truly resolved crowd control issues.
On the other hand, it seems like every time I visited the old location, the place was packed. But somehow they usually managed to keep up, so although I was sometimes bumping into other customers, I could still get my business done promptly enough.
I've been a T-Mobile customer for a long time. I got my Note 3 at the one-block-north store. I got a Blackberry Bold 9700 (the best phone of its era), possibly at the same location. I had a couple of flip phones with T-Mobile, and even an ancient "candy bar" style phone. The carrier has always had pretty good customer service; the main reason I switched to them (from Verizon, soon after it changed names from Airtouch) was customer service. I've dealt with the other three major carriers second-hand, and they're better than the others' not-so-good service.
Also, a review-writing tip: there's not really a good place to Yelp about carrier issues, but it's not really fair to blame a store location for issues with the carrier. Although I mention the carrier in this review, I don't count it toward my star rating. read more
