huawei g300 failure and lesson: avoid like plague

i bought a huawei g300 about 5 months back; after going through a lot of reviews. I was not a smartphone fan; in fact I am more than happy with Nokia X2-02 and Samsung E2232.

I think it was bad karma which made me buy this stupid smartphone thingy, and that too from Huawei. The phone was a bit slow; expected because of limited memory. Apart from that, and very poor FM radio reception, the phone was ok. One morning, some day last week I woke to see the phone blanked out. I thought that maybe wifi had been left on, and the battery had drained out. I put the phone on charge, and tried to switch it on. No response from the phone. I let it charge for some more time, thinking that the phone had drained off completely. After sometime, the battery showed 10% in the battery icon itself; the phone was still not on. It was unusual; because usually by that duration battery is usually 30%. I removed the charger, pulled out the battery and put it back in and restarted. This time it went to 40%, I was satisfied and pressed the power button on top. The phone started; joy. But not so fast; it got stuck at the huawei logo. Internally, I felt that this was not good and something bad was happening. After multiple restarts, battery removals, the phone managed to go to the homescreen. But, no signal! It did not recognise any carrier. After lot of searches using Google; I saw that people in UK had suffered from the same problem; but some of them had the problem after the phone was unlocked from a carrier. In India, there is no such problem of tying to a carrier. So i thought that this was not my problem and tried to look for other reasons. At some point I did a complete wipe/factory reset; and lost all my apps as well. Some people had problems with "Airplane mode on"; i also had that icon creeping up occasionally. While the airplane icon was present; the great thing was that if I went to settings, the mode would be off.

After multplile and increasingly frustrating reboots, SIM changes; I saw that my IMEI number was unknown. It is baaaaad news. I had not rooted; not installed dodgy apps but my phone just dies on me! I sent an email outlining my frustration to the Huawei Indian website day before yesterday. Naturally, I got no response. Dodgy chinese company employing indians who on an average have no sense of pride in their work and have no self esteem being enslaved for millenia and now being low cost code monkeys; I do not expect anything from them.

I will have to travel 15 km to see if the phone can be salvaged by the service centre. Since there is warranty; I hope not to be charged any money. But I would rather junk the phone than pay a rupee to this junk company.