Do You Believe In Love At First Sight?

In December 2015 while in a business trip to Frankfurt I acquired a LG G4 smartphone. I had read great reviews in several websites and was considered a great "flagship" device for the entire LG mobile phone product line.

It had a gorgeous display, was amazingly fast, had an awesome camera and lots of memory space (I had added a 64 GB SD card). I enjoyed the device for a whole year and even recommended it among my family, friends and acquaintances.

I loaded it with the apps that y use everyday, such as the Linkedin app, the Gmail app, Tidal, Netflix... I even started to use it as a universal remote control, due to the availability of an IR blaster. The G4 handled every task with gusto.

I thought that it was a really cool device, something like an underdog phone that liked to hide behind an unsophisticated housing.

The beginning of the end , or the end of the beginning

LG's warranty expired in December 2016, I really didn't care much, so far the G4 had performed so well I couldn't be happier. I employed it as a audible book reader, so I could use commuting time to listen to a growing collection of e-books. Tidal worked really fine. Google Maps was a killer.

Last week my beloved G4 crashed twice. On both occasions the crash was followed by a black screen. Also, on both occasions, a restart seemed to fix the problem. "Just a glitch", I thought. I was wrong, really wrong...

That weekend the G4 crashed once again into a black screen and after restarting, it entered into a restart loop, more precisely a "bootloop".

Dance Me to the End of Love

After some Google research I found out some really bad news. The bootloop problem was massive. It affected LG G3, G4 and G5 models and could appear on the V10 and V20 models. It was so common that it had received an official name: BLOD or Black Screen Of Death.

The G4 bootloop problem had been identified as a manufacture defect: the connection of the CPU or/and the wireless chip to the main logic board was faulty. After 12 to 16 months of use, the heat dissipated by either the CPU or the wireless chip damaged the connections between the chips and the mainboard effectively disconnecting the CPU and completely bricking the device.

Bootloop, bootloop, everybody has bootloop

There were signature collecting campaigns in Reddit, Pinterest and several social networks that asked LG to offer a solution to all affected G4 users. A Change.org campaign had 12000+ signatures for a letter addressed to Mr. Jun-Ho Cho, President and CEO of LG Mobile Communications Company.

This means more than 12000 faulty phones!!! In a single, and rather obscure, social network!!!!

You can lie a long time to a few people, or a short time to a lot of people, but never all the time to all the people

I found that the Amazon reviews for the G4 had shifted in one year from +80% positive reviews (4 to 5 stars) to 54% and the totally negative reviews (1 star) had risen from 4% to a whooping 41%, all describing the bootloop issue appearing just about the warranty expiration date.

E-bay and its Argentine equivalent Mercado Libre (Free Market.... LOL) listed dozens of "perfectly good used G4's" that just needed a "mainboard replacement". The G4 is a "lemon" with capital L.

The "hidden cost" of phone repairs

I then contacted the LG support center in Argentina, where I was informed that since my G4 had not been bought in the country it was not covered by LG Argentina's subsidiary. Additionally the only solution available was to send the phone to a local official repair shop.

I went to the nearest local official repair shop and received a quotation for the phone repair: 5200 Argentine Pesos (roughly 350 USD), that is more than 40% of the price of a brand new G4. I told them that I wanted my phone back, since replacement mainboards could be bought at Amazon for less than 120 USD.

This means that phone fixing has humongous labor costs, surprising for a job that implies removing the phone's back cover, taking out ten screws, disconnecting three flexible strip connectors and changing the board. This means about 20 minutes of work.

If we make some numbers the labor cost per hour for phone fixing is 230 USD per 20 minutes, or 690 USD per hour. I wish I could charge my customers 690 USD per hour for hazardous areas consulting.

To add insult to humiliation, the repair shop attendant told me that they would return my bricked G4 after I paid the "diagnostics" fee (120 Argentine Pesos or 8 USD). I will be receiving the dead G4 in a couple of days.

The truth behind the boot-loop

Meanwhile I did some additional research for DIY fixes of the bootloop. There are quite a few Youtube videos and tutorials. Most of them are based on the following procedure: dismount the mainboard from the phone, remove the CPU's heat-shield and then apply heat to the CPU with a hot air blower or a hairdryer fro a few minutes. This heat will soften the welding points of the CPU and the thermal paste located between the chip and the mainboard. Then you carefully apply pressure to the chip, connecting it back to the mainboard, wait until it has cooled down and then reassemble the phone. This procedure usually unbricks the G4, at least temporarily so you can make a full backup.

"Planned obsolescence"

Everybody has heard one or more stories about the concept of "planned obsolescence", or a manufacturing philosophy that believes in creating goods that have a built in expiration date.

This concept was born in the mid 1920's. The world's largest incandescent lamp bulb makers were worried about the lifetime of their competitor s light-bulbs. So these manufacturers (OSRAM, GE, Philips, etc) agreed to limit the lifespan of their light-bulbs to roughly 6-8 months. They even defined fines that had to be collected from any manufacturer that did not comply with the agreement.

The smartphone market is already a mature one, most smartphone users fell no need to upgrade their phones annually, so the replacement cycle is longer than before.

An issue like the bootloop fiasco of LG, or the exploding Samsung Note 7 phablets or several other issues that have occurred in the last couple of years hints that smartphone makers are being left without honest ways to tempt users to upgrade.

Coming from the Industrial Automation market, I find it difficult to understand how these multi million companies that handle the smartphone market fail to demonstrate the same commitment to their customers that they pretend to have when doing their annual product presentations.

For me LG went from rock to suck in 13 months.

Do you have any similar rock to suck stories? Please add your comments and thoughts. They will be most welcome.

Mirko Torrez Contreras is a Freelance Process Automation Consultant that craves for cool gizmos. This time the gizmo became a gremlin after 12 months. So, don't use your LG gizmo after 12 moths, or it will transform into a LG gremlin...

The spanish version of this article is available in the following link.



