Well I exchanged my third iPhone for another one at Apple Store here in Nagoya. This is my fourth device in just a couple of months after iPhone introduction here in Japan.
A little history on replacements..
My first iPhone was fine for first 2 weeks and then developed a dead pixel near the edge of the screen. Not extremely annoying, but once you know it's there, well.. it just somehow take up good half of the screen and you just keep staring at it all day long. Got this iPhone replaced at Apple Store, without any problems.
My next iPhone was.. well.. I was bad because I seemed to have fried its modem's firmware after jailbraking and then updating it to 2.0.1 firmware, without first reverting to unjailbroken state. Still, I guess I was lucky that neither Apple nor Softbank got a clue problems like that might (and possible ony) happen if you jailbrake the device. I got the unit replaced at Softbank shop.
OK.. My third iPhone was fine and all, but ever after getting my hands on it I noticed that display's glass sort of floats about 0.5mm above the edge of the metal bevel. And since I had my previous 2 units with glass screen on the level with the bevel, I was worried about dust getting inside. But oh well it was my third unit, so I decided just to just be tolerant about this issue. And everything was fine for about a month, I even stopped paying attention to the fact that there was a slight problem with the build quality of my iPhone. Until one day I noticed a white dot on my screen again. Almost right in the middle of the screen, and pretty well annoying this time. "Oh, a dead pixel again?" - I thought. And brought my iPhone to Apple Store, yet again.
After a quick examination, it turned out that the "dead pixel" was actually a speck of dust under the screen glass! How the hell it got there at all, not even telling getting right into the center of the screen, is a little beyond me. However, I think the misaligned screen was the source of the problem.
Anyways, this time Apple Store's genius rejected to replace my iPhone, telling me that the device is not dust proof. It took me about half an hour to finally convince the guy at the counter to replace my iPhone. For the very last time, I was told.
So, since it was my supposedly (and hopefully) last time of needing to replace the unit, I asked to bring me at least 2 devices so I could actually choose the one with the best build quality. In the end, I ended up choosing from 4 units!
I think it's pretty easy to guess why I had to choose from that many units. The build quality just.. I dunno.. not the best:
2 of the units I was presented with had misaligned, floating screens, just like my iPhone with dust speck under the glass screen, another one actually had a dust speck preinstalled under the screen glass - for my convinience I suppose :)
The fourth unit was flawless.. And I really, really hope it stays this way for months and years to come..
So, what's this babble is all about? Have a look yourself.. I touched 7 iPhone units, of which I owned/own four, for period from a few weeks to just over a month. 3 of them had misaligned screens (of which one got dust speck under the screen after a month of usage - and no, I'm not doing extreme sports and such), 1 of the NEW units already had dusk speck under the screen, one unit developed bad pixel after 2 weeks of usage. So, out of 7 units, only 2 were absolutely fine for any prolonged period (if you can call 2-3 weeks a prolonged period) .
I'd say, either Apple needs to probably do something about build quality of the iPhones, or I need to get my luck with the electronic devices back..
