And so the saga of "This is a joke" begins:
The phone arrived at 08:54 this morning, in a completely unblemished DPD Couriers consignment bag, sealed, everything looks like it's been handled correctly. Unfortunately this is where the good news ends.
I wander up to my desk (I had it delivered to work), make myself comfortable and prepare to open up my first Android handset package, quite excited in that "geeky new toy" kind of way. Carefully removed the DPD bag only to be confronted with a blatently abused and previously opened box:
Ok doesn't look "too" bad, might have just been bumped around a bit in the warehouse...
Ok, now I find that its not sealed at all, and has actually been opened twice (two completely different VOID sticker types have been laid one over the other)
So, I open the box, now not exactly confident in what I might find beneath...
What's this? The phone doesn't fit in the box properly. I lift the phone to find the battery is just sat there under the phone, naked, not in any sealing or bag, just there on its own, looking rather damaged and lifting the phone beyond the confines of its little cubby hole in the box:
Yes, that's two stab wounds and a deep gouge to the battery, on what I was lead to believe was a "brand new, unopened" phone. I'm now very much under the impression that this isn't actually a new phone at all, so start to take a look at the packaging and contents a bit more closely.
So, the box is actually mashed up pretty badly, almost as if someone has stuffed the contents back in not quite knowing how they fit together... Synical? Me? Never!
Yes it's quite hard to see (stupid iPhone camera), but that is the top of the back panel, scuffed, scratched and even misshapen, the button is also scratched to death.
Oh look, missing content. Actually what was missing from the box was quite a lot, starting with the neoprene(?) case that comes with the phone, completely missing. The documentation was also AWOL, nowhere to be seen. The phone contained no memory card (was advised it should have a 4GB card?), and the headphones were absent from the box too.
So, first impressions, not good.