We are all looking for a
bargain deal. The question is whether or not we really
got a bargain. You find a retailer who is selling a
battery for only $18.95 each, normally sold for $49.95;
a special offer to all customers. You jump on it and
pay the $18.95 for the battery and are feeling real
good that you got a deal that time. But did you really
get a deal? You get the battery home and it appears to
work just fine.
A couple of months
later, you find that the battery you are now using
needs to be replaced. You break out that battery you
got on special and charge it up. Later you put it on
your phone with no problem. A few hours later, you
notice that the charge had dropped quite a bit since
you charged it. A couple of days go by, and the problem
not only persists, but is actually getting worse.
For this example, we
will say that you bought the battery online through an
Internet company. You contact the company and, after a
week, you finally get a response from them saying they
cannot replace the battery since it was sold on
special. You want your money back and look for a
telephone number so you can call them. You find they
have no contact information other than an e-mail
address. You write to them again to ask for a phone
number, and they tell you they are from another
country. What this means now is that not only do you
have no way to verify that they are a legitimate
company, but you have no legal recourse to complain or
rectify the situation since they are not based in the
US.
Even if they are in the
US, good luck in trying to get them to disclose contact
information other than an email address. We cannot
emphasize enough that you need to step back and look at
what is being offered. Does the company look like they
do enough volume to order products in such mass
quantities to offer such a low price? Do they disclose
full contact information? The best guess in most cases
is that the answer would be NO to both of them.
Sometimes we fail to remember the old adage that
"We get what we pay for."
We heard of one
situation where a cellular phone user found a deal
where he would get a leather case and rapid car charger
for only $16.95 for both of them. When he received the
products, the rapid charger was of poor quality and the
leather case was made of fake leather. Neither of them
lasted more than a couple of months. This person paid
for what they got and admitted that it was the
situation.
When you go to buy any
cellular phone product, make sure to check the quality
of the products you are ordering. If it is a leather
case, ask if it is double-stitched (instead of
single-stitched), with two rivets (not one) and whether
it is real leather. Otherwise, it is going to come
apart within a very short time.
The other item you need
to look at is a rapid car charger. You will want
a rapid charger that has an intelligent chip installed
within it. If for some reason the battery burns out or
goes bad, the chip knows this and prevents the charger
from discharging an electrical current into the phone
by going into "trickle mode". When this
happens, the element will get warm to the touch. That
is a very good sign that there is something wrong with
the phone or the battery is fully charged and the
charger has nowhere to discharge the current. Quite
often a customer who is a low volume user will
continuously plug in the hands-free kit or rapid
charger to ensure the phone is charged at all times. Do
not do this unless your battery needs to be charged.
If you use a rapid car
charger that doesn’t have one of these, then you will
almost certainly turn your phone into a lump of useless
plastic at some point in time. If you have one, then
you are playing a game of Russian Roulette. These
chargers are the ones that are usually given away for
free by retailers.
Remember that a cellular
phone is a fragile electronic device. This means that a
rapid car charger will help prevent a power surge to a
phone if it has a chip installed. That is not to say
that it can completely eliminate the possibility.
Follow your user operator instructions to prevent
something nasty from happening to your phone.
