Mark, a little update.

One victim of this issue (with a brand new device!) reports the following today:

"I just got out of the Nokia care center. They confirmed that they had recived an update on the issue today.

It states that if the pads have been removed from the board they should not repair it under warranty."

He was denied proper service based on that.

I need to make something clear on this: the amount of force that *should* be necessary to shear off copper lands (traces, pads, etc) would be severe enough to result in damage to other areas. If user abuse was in any involved, you would see other examples (extreme distortion of the connector, damage to housing, etc). The fact that the lands are shearing without any collateral damage is a strong indicator that the problem lies with their (poor) bond to the PCB surface. If users were responsible, you might see something like needle-nose plier marks on the connector, or a gouge around the housing opening.

Merely removing a male plug should not result in this catastrophic failure. But it is. And it is in no way a user fault.

Normally it would take someone disassembling a device and deliberately prying the connector off to cause this degree of damage. The evidence shows this is not the case (and unlikely anyway). Shear should simply not be occurring so easily as it is. In over 20 years experience with PCB design and manufacturing I have never seen such a thing-- but then, in every design I've been involved with such connectors were through-hole mounted and would be highly unlikely to even budge eevn with user abuse.

Hopefully the communication above was in error, but I am concerned that the "evidence of rough handling" disclaimer *may* be improperly applied...