Just over a year ago I decided to buy a new electric toothbrush in the sale and settled on a Philips - there wasn't anything particularly wrong with my old electric toothbrush it's just that it had seen better days and didn't look too flash anymore.
My new toothbrush served me well, though I would have the occasional grumble about the unnecessarily expensive toothbrush head replacements! As there is less plastic to them then you might expect them too be less expensive than a normal toothbrush but noooo.
Anyway I could live with that and everything was going swimmingly for just over a year until my brush started acting pretty erratically. Every so often it would just refuse to stop and I'd have to either just keep brushing my teeth forever or leave it in the sink till its fit was over. The odd behaviour wouldn't stop there as I'd leave it on the charging dock for the expected period only to press the on button for it to immediately fizzle out to dead again.
It then recently reached the point where it just had nothing left to give and died on me.
I must say I felt like this was quite peculiar as I've never had an electrical product actually die on me for no specific reason before. I did some research and a lot of people post videos and comments about the battery dying and needing replacing.
What I did find that upset and angered me is that there is a general consensus that Philips electric toothbrushes are made with a lifespan of just over the year's warranty in mind! Now that I'm a bit older and know how big corporate businesses work, I have realised this is a very likely theory. Some gentlemen even commented that he was on his third Philips toothbrush in as many years (change the brand of toothbrush then!!!!).
I'm well aware that lots of companies will do this type of thing, after all I think it was in the 70s or sometime when companies realised if you make things to last then you've lost yourself a big chunk of the market as people will never need to buy the product again.
Well of course I didn't want to be another pawn and I decided to change the battery myself...Philips make it look pretty simple in its website instructions...except it isn't. Even turning a screwdriver in the base of my toothbrush to open it up nearly shredded it. Once I did have it open I found the battery near impossible to remove. In fact the battery was corroding and I felt as though it was going to blow up on me if I wasn't careful.
In the end I decided to scrap the whole thing and go for a regular toothbrush for now. But this is the first time I've felt compelled to write a review of sorts and say how utterly disappointed I am that a company builds products with designer errors and life expectancies so that people are suckered in to buying more.
I for one am never going to buy a Philips product again and hope they see the disappointment of those people naively writing about how Philips have said they are outside of their warranty and "there's nothing they can do".
