It happens. You’re standing up talking to a friend, and an aggressive bull moose that’s been stalking you bumps you from behind, sending your brand new cell phone that was held carelessly in your hand smashing onto the pavement; or sinking beneath the human-caused ripples of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, with deleterious results.

It doesn’t matter who the manufacturer is – Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Siemens, Sanyo, Blackberry, Sprint’s Treo, Nextel, Cingular, T-Mobile, or U.S. Cellular – to name a few of the bigger names – if your cell phone breaks, it’s likely to take 2-5 weeks to get it repaired, and if it’s not under strict warranty guidelines, it won’t get fixed at all. In any case, having its manufacturer repair your cell phone isn’t going to be cheap.

Contacting any company for support let alone a warranty repair typically entails a sense of dread often synonymous with portents such as Error! Hyperlink reference is not valid. After receiving a message like that, it’s hard to feel validated ever again. Sending in your cell phone is like executing a childhood dare. Months later, the battered and abused phone might come back, or it might return sooner, say in a week, still broken, or unlike Lassie, it might never return to its owner at all.


By contrast, independent repair shops specializing in cell phone repair have been springing up like dial tones, all over the United States, and some of these shops offer solutions that might seem miraculous to frustrated cell phone owners. Many of these cell phone repair emporiums offer 48-hour, or even same day repair services. A majority offer 5-7 day turnarounds on mail-in repairs, and a few will repair a broken or even a mangled cell phone while a customer waits. Cost is also an issue; often the overhead and miscellaneous charges disappear at independent repair outlets; besides being a great deal faster, charges for the actual repair might be a fraction of what the manufacturer would have charged. At the independents, another plus is that warranty restrictions are not likely to preclude or interrupt cell phone repair. Such "non-warranty" repairs are also, in rare cases, guaranteed to produce superior results or your money back. It used to be that sending your broken cell phone back to its manufacturer was a customer’s only option. The operative phrase is "used to be."