Cancel without penalties

[Anonymous]

Can I cancel my contract early and not have to pay any charges if O2 are not fulfilling their part of the deal?
I am about 16 months into a 24 month contract for which I pay approx £60/month which includes £10 insurance. My Galaxy S3 started playing up a few weeks ago and I sent it to O2 for repair. When it came back it was still the same, keeps resetting itself, freezing, apps don't respond etc etc. O2 then said they would send a replacement phone to me within 3 working days. The next day I received a text saying no phones are available at mo and they would send one as soon as possible. That was a week ago and it's becoming increasingly frustrating as my phone will now not switch on. I don't want to be without a phone over Xmas and want to go elsewhere now.

[Anonymous]

As it is at the moment, when turned on it displays the screen with 'Samsung Galaxy SIII GT-19300' and that's how it stays. When doing a hard reset it shows the Android robot and lots of lines red writing such as
'E:failed to mount/system' then in yellow writing says 'manual mode' followed by loads more lines red writing all starting E: Failed or E: can't . Then it enables me to 'wipe data/factory reset' which I do then reboot and it goes back to the original screen 'Samsung Galaxy SIII GT-19300' and stays like that again.

[MI5]

OK, bootloader failure...
We can reflash firmware with Odin....
http://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Android-Devices-Samsung-HTC-Sony/HOW-TO-A-Guide-to-using-Odin/m-p/46346...
I need to know if your handset is O2 branded or not and can point you to searching the correct firmware.

[Anonymous]

If O2 branded means the O2 bubbles start up thingy then yes my phone does that when starting up

[MI5 · Accepted solution]

OK, go to this page on Sammobile http://www.sammobile.com/firmwares/ and type into the search box (where it says "search device here") i9300o2u.
You need to download the first file that comes at the top of the list.
It is a complete firmware, modem and bootloader file so will update the entire phone os (if the option in Odin is available, tick "bootloader update").
After flashing reboot the phone and skip past the start up options, shut down and do the factory reset again then start up the phone and setup the owner options. After completing these steps, leave the phone alone for 10 mins, then shut down and restart again.
Hopefully all should be good but if not you have ruled out software failure and it must be a hardware issue.