It all started one fine mid-afternoon, not long after I got ahold of my iPhone. I was playing Cube Runner, a free game where you have to steer an aircraft of sort away from cubes by tilting the iPhone sideways, lest it collide with one and explode into pieces (See YouTube video after the jump). For the information of those uninitiated in the wonderful pieces of technologies embedded within the iPhone, the device has an accelerometer that detects changes in its orientation and triggers the display to act in accordance to the algorithm of the application on hand.

Long story short, I noticed the calibration of my phone's accelerometer was a bit off. Wait, make that really, undeniably off. For when the display should be horizontal, it was off by at least 30 degrees. This struck me as odd seeing as I did not encounter this kind of malfunction with my old iPod touch. What I did was to manually calibrate the accelerometer using the settings within the Cube Runner app so I could play the game as designed. But even then, the other tilt-driven apps would bear the glitch and there's no guarantee each of them had a local calibration option.

Okay, okay, I'm sounding way too technical for my own sake, so I'll proceed with the thing that I'm sure all of us have had experiences of, pleasant or otherwise: dealing with customer service reps.

So I trekked to the Globe Business Center in SM Megamall where I got the phone and told Sir John, the supposed head honcho of them customer service reps, about my predicament. I demoed Cube Runner to him and showed the angular deviation. So will you replace my iPhone? I asked. He then took the phone and tried the pre-installed apps which were designed so as to change orientation when one tilts the device in a predetermined manner. As soon as he was certain that these apps shifted from portrait to landscape and back when he rotated the phone 90 degrees each time, he argued that my phone was not eligible for replacement after all since the accelerometer was functional and that as per Apple's cryptic policies third-party apps such as Cube Runner could not be used as basis for inspecting, troubleshooting or diagnosing an iPhone. Crud.

So how then did I end up letting go of my beloved iPhone, giving it to a lady stranger behind a shiny Globe Business Center counter? You didn't think I'd already stop at Part 2, did you? Like most film producers, I'm a sucker for trilogies.

To be concluded...