Alex has a Samsung Galaxy SII on AT&T, and his phone has one of the common defects of that model: it likes to randomly shut itself down for no reason. Instead of casting him into smartphone replacement purgatory, AT&T and Samsung are instead trying to divert him into repair purgatory. His phone will be totally fine after their repair, AT&T assured him. It wasn’t. He turned to Samsung and made his case to them. They were willing to repair his phone, but not replace it. [More]