Iphone 16 won't work out of the box and now I can't call EE to tell them

[newphone1010101]

Hi all,

I have recently upgraded to an iPhone 16 pro max. I got this out of the box, began the setup and now it is stuck on the 'Hello' page. When I swipe up it shows the keypad for a split second before disappearing. It is also impossible to turn the phone off and it is getting very, very hot. I have attempted to fix this myself to no avail. As part of the setup before this point I converted my physical SIM to an eSIM, therefore I am now unable to make calls from my old phone (which is due to go back to EE), and thus can't report this issue to EE as the technical support can only be accessed via a call and when I have attempted to use the live chat option to at least flag this to EE, it says approx 5 min wait time but I have currently been waiting over an hour. If this phone is not returned before 28/12/24 I will get a £475 fine. I'll struggle to get in store in this time, what can I do?

[Peter_W]

Hi there @newphone1010101.

Thanks for reaching out to us here on the EE Community, and I'm sorry to hear your new phone experience hasn't been the smoothest of sailing so far. 

If you haven't tried this already, can you please try a soft reset on the phone when it freezes to see if you can kick this back into gear?
To do this just quickly press and release the volume up button, followed by the volume down button, then hold the side lock button until you see the apple logo.

Peter

[newphone1010101]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your speedy reply. Looks like I'll be taking it into my local store this Thursday. I bought a new SIM to complete a WiFi call.

I had done this, I even got as far as plugging it into my laptop and the restore option came up but unfortunately this made no difference as clicking the restore button did nothing.

My big gripe with all this is that I have had to buy a new SIM, just to use my phone and if I want to make any calls I'll have to give EE more money to put credit on when I'm already paying for a phone that doesn't work. I cant just 'nip' in-store either to get a replacement SIM, so really quite frustrated with this situation

[Peter_W]

Thanks for the update here @newphone1010101.

I appreciate this is far from ideal, it's rare that handsets have trouble right out of the box, but we certainly won't want to see you wrong if this has been the case. 

Visiting our team in-store is definitely going to be the best option in this case, and they should be able to get you sorted with a replacement SIM with your number for your existing phone in the meantime.

I don't envision any issues with the timescale for trading in your existing phone, but even if you do pass the date and a charge is applied, it's not final and if we get the phone back at a later date it can be removed.

Please keep us posted on how you get on too; once you have a connection active again you're more than welcome to reach out to our customer care team to speak about any other charges you've incurred through these issues too.

Peter

[newphone1010101]

Cheers Peter,

Just gonna sit tight whilst Thursday.

Fingers crossed gets sorted 🙂

[Peter_W]

Thanks @newphone1010101, keep us posted on how you get on 😊

Peter