One of the reasons you might have purchased a Samsung Galaxy S4 or Galaxy Note 3 is because the phones are covered by Samsung’s Accidental Damage Handling (ADH) extended warranty. That’s the free cover that gives you two repairs for screen or water damage, no questions asked, over the first two years of the phone’s life. It’s a big deal, and offered exclusively to Africans – because this continent is not kind to phones.
The thing is that you have to register your phone with Samsung within the first 30 days of ownership, as made clear on this website. And as far as we can tell, no-one is making this clear.
There’s no leaflet included with a new phone, for example, that tells you about ADH or registering. ADH isn’t mentioned on the ads or in any of the mobile operators’ promotional literature. We’ve collated experiences from three different mobile franchise shops so far where salespeople have never heard of it, let alone encouraged people to apply.
In the Cresta branch of Vodacom, for example, the editor of our sister publication PhotoComment was told that there was no ADH for the Note 3 which was the same thing one of our ZA Tech Show listeners was told.
@davegreenway No. They did not tell me. Heard that i had to register on @zatech . I was at the Vodashop yesterday and the Note 3 has no ADH.
— Francois Gouws (@francois_gouws) October 18, 2013
Clearly there’s a break down in communications somewhere here, and we’re concerned that South Africans are going miss out on this excellent warranty or, worse, try to claim on it because they’ve read it in a news story and discover that they can’t.
The full details of the ADH warranty are available on Samsung’s website but we’ve got the run down on how to register your device for those in SA.
- To activate the warranty you’ll need to write down your IMEI number which you can get by dialing *#06# from your phone app.
- Go to ‘messages’ application on your smartphone
- Create new message to the following number: 34622
- Then type: REG*IMEI NUMBER#
- Send
You should get a message back from Samsung saying
“Thank you for buying a Samsung S4. Registration SUCCESSFUL. You have 2 year warranty from date of purchase. This will be followed by a Second message to all S4 users:
(* Standard SMS rates apply in the selected countries)
In the event of damage, you will then be able to take the device to an Accredited Samsung Service Centre who will replace the screen or board free of charge with no incident fee having to be paid by the customer.”
