After owning a DS for only a month, the right hinge has already cracked! Apparently, this is a systematic problem that 0.02% of all DSes encounter; that’s 1 in ever 5000, but since Nintendo has sold 50 million DSes, that’s 10,000 DSes worldwide! I supposed I could live with it; except that in the end the right hinge might totally fall off. So I set out to get Nintendo to warranty replace it.

The whole process was pretty painless. First, I went on their website and filled in the warranty form. I received an email response with instructions on how to package the unit and Purolator it to them at their expense. But before I sent anything off, I wanted to make sure that any repairs would be covered under warranty since Nintendo had a policy of not covering physical damage.

I sent them an email with the description of the problem and a picture of the hinge, but received a canned response asking me to call in. I did and the person on the phone, while polite, did not seem to want to confirm Nintendo’s offer of free repairs on cracked hinges. Although after some time he did say that he would make an exception and cover it under the warranty.

So this morning, I brought my DS to the repair facility just south of Kennedy Commons. It’s a non-descript place without any mention of Nintendo until you enter the building (there’s a picture of Mario). I was able to immediately exchange my DS for a new one and the whole process took 10 minutes. The person actually exchanged it before asking me what the problem was, now I’m not sure whether this was because I had the recently-released Crimson model, or because my previous call had set a flag on my repair order saying that I was eligible for a replacement. The other thing I noticed was that there were existing “problem codes” for hinge problems (at least for the left hinge, which was what the person said my problem was — although it was really the right hinge).

Anyways, now I have a new shiny DS again, hopefully it will work properly as I haven’t tested it yet.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: nintendo