eWireless

Quick and reliable repairs, very competitive prices and great customer service. As a bonus, they have a café attached to the business with the best sandwiches in town!

eWireless and its employees are incompetent, unreliable, and dishonest. Their shoddy work has led to a larger investment of time and money than should be required when it comes to simple electronics repair.
Yesterday, I brought an iPhone 4 in to have the home button, the power button, the ring/​silent switch, and volume buttons replaced. My phone was returned to me with these buttons repaired. However, light now leaks out of the headphone jack, my headphones no longer work on the left side, and I can only intermittently use the headset for phone calls. None of these issues was present before I brought the phone in.
Upon a recommendation, I dropped my phone off at eWireless and explained that the buttons were no longer working. The employee who received the iPhone tried the buttons and couldn’t get them to work.
He said he’d try his best, but if there was water damage, there may be some things he couldn’t fix. I said again that the buttons had lost functionality gradually. I didn’t think there was any reason there would be water damage.
I picked it up and flew out to California, where I live. I noticed that light from my screen was bleeding into the headphone jack, something my phone did not do before. I also realized at this point that my ear buds only worked on the left side, and that I could only sometimes use them for a phone call. I tried a different set of headphones and they were also only working on the left side. I tried both headphones on another device and they worked normally.
After an Apple Genius said the phone had probably been the victim of a bad repair, I called eWireless a woman offered me a refund for the labor but not for the parts. I asked who would pay for the additional parts and service I now needed. She said she’d talk to her supervisor again. She never got back on the phone. After I had been on the line for an hour, I hung up and called back.
This time, the «supervisor» picked up. He was the man I dealt with the day before.
What ensued was one of the most frustrating customer service experiences I ever had. He claimed I had brought him a water-​damaged phone that was completely dead. When I told him that wasn’t the case, that only the buttons were broken, he asked, «Are you kidding me right now? Are you serious?»
I explained that aside from the buttons, the phone itself worked fine. I could use it as a phone, as an iPod, to go online. All of that functioned as long as I pressed firmly on the buttons first to open the phone. Moreover, if I couldn’t get the home button to respond, I could still administer a good squeeze on the power button to bring up the home screen and then unlock the phone.
He said that wasn’t true, that the phone only worked when he plugged it in. This is despite the fact that the phone was on when he plugged it in (the home screen came up, not the boot logo), and I had made a phone call before going into the store. Evidently, neither he nor the repair people had actually inspected the phone very closely before repairing it.
I asked him if he had seen the moisture sensors, he said they were lit up. I said that the buttons had this problem months previous and the Apple Genius indicated wear was the issue, not water damage. He claimed the Apple Store did not open phones.
When I asked him why the light was now coming out of the headphone jack, he laughed and said, «They all do that.» (Mine didn’t before going in for repair.)
In the end, he did offer to check the phone to verify issue with the headphone jack, but only if I shipped it back to him at my expense. I use my phone for work and can’t be without it for the amount of time it would take to do that. He said, «Are you kidding? I can overnight an iPhone to Canada right now for $ 10.»
He would not issue a refund, nor would he authorize the labor refund offered earlier. At this point, he had been so rude and so unpleasant; I wouldn’t have come back to eWireless for additional repairs anyway. The terrible customer service had convinced me it wasn’t a good place to do business.
I told him if he would not issue a refund, I was going to have to contest the charge through Bank of America. He invited me to do so.
A different repair store and pointed out that eWireless had removed a number of screws from the inside of the phone and not replaced them when putting the new parts in. At one point, eWireless had put adhesive tape underneath a wire that should have been flush. The poor installation had led to the headphone jack malfunction.
More importantly, when I asked if the moisture sensors had ever been triggered, the new repairman said that the inside of the phone was «immaculate.» The moisture sensors had never been activated. In fact, one moisture sensor was damaged where eWireless had used a screwdriver to move it while trying to repair the buttons.
I don’t fully expect a business like eWireless with this kind of ethic to refund me for their poor service. Lesson learned.