Irene Stevenson bought her daughter a Sony Ericsson W910i mobile phone in a Meteor shop last December and paid €149 for it. Several weeks ago, it started acting up. It kept switching itself off intermittently, buzzed, random letters appeared on the screen and it turned itself from silent to general and frequently dropped calls and cut out.

She was told she needed to go to the Sony website to download updated software, but the phone wouldn’t turn on, so she couldn’t figure out how to download anything; after several attempts she gave up.

Stevenson returned the phone to the store where it was bought and staff told her they would send it off for repair. She was given a replacement handset for the time she was without her phone, although was required to pay a €40 deposit on it.

Several days later the phone was returned to her. Turns out it was still broken. She contacted the Meteor store again last weekend and was told by a manager that he was unprepared to give her a refund or a replacement for the handset and said that Meteor had a policy which meant its engineers would have to attempt to repair the phone on three separate occasions before it “would consider” replacing it.

He also said it was store policy to replace like with like which meant that even though she had lost confidence in that Sony Ericsson handset, she could not get an alternate model.

We contacted Meteor to find out more. We were told that on the second occasion our reader left in the phone to be repaired, the store had contacted its repairs team “to fast-track the phone and ensure that it was turned around as quickly as possible”.

The spokeswoman said all mobiles that are returned need to be sent away for repair “so that the cause of the issue can be fully investigated and fixed”. She confirmed that Meteor had a policy which said that devices would have to be repaired on three separate occasions before a refund or replacement would be offered, although she said that each handset repair “is taken on a case-by-case basis and treated according to the severity of the problem”.

Meteor did, however, accept that Stevenson should have had a better “customer experience” and offered an apology. The spokeswoman said it was reviewing its handset repair policy and procedures, and added that our reader had been offered an LG Cookie handset as a replacement phone.

Stock goes up

Last week we reviewed Knorr Vegetable Stockpot and said a packet cost €2.89 for 112g – €25.80 per kg. It was a price we considered excessively high, but the good news is that the actual price for the product is €1.89 for 112g or €16.87 per kg, considerably cheaper than we said. At the lower price, it becomes the cheapest of the stocks we reviewed, which is very much to its credit.