This post is not strictly speaking to do with photography, but it does reflect the range of quality in after sales service you can expect from different consumer electronics manufacturers. A couple of weeks ago my 20 month old HTC Desire smartphone needed to go back for repair. The phone had started to reboot itself without warning and for no apparent reason.

HTC's warranty is for two years so I gave their customer support team a call, no problem they said, we'll have the phone collected by UPS and get it repaired for you. It was collected on a Monday and I had it back on the following Thursday after the mainboard had been replaced. I couldn't really complain about that!

And then at the other end of the spectrum; I bought an Archos 80 G9 Android tablet at the beginning of December, so it was just over a month old at the time when, after several weeks of trying to solve a problem with web video crashing the tablet (and Archos' customer support blaming the websites I was trying to view content from - er, like BBC iPlayer?) and then talking to then directly, they agreed to have the tablet back and even replace it. Good news, I thought - until a) I was told it would take 2-3 weeks and b) I was completely responsible for the cost of shipping the tablet back to Archos.

In the end, I struck it lucky because although I had bought the tablet online from the Carphone Warehouse, I was told by their customer service that my local store would accept the return at no cost to myself. In the end the store used their discretion and replaced the faulty tablet with a new one from stock.

So will I be buying another HTC in the future - you bet! And probably via the Carphone Warehouse. Archos - your products are cheap, which in some ways is good, but so is your service (I mean cheap, not good.).