Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I purchased this phone for the expressed purpose of developing VR projects for Gear VR and Google Cardboard. I never expected or intended to use the phone features of the device. So I never added a SIM card much less carried it around or away from my office. After a couple of weeks the OS seemed to have crapped out and got itself stuck on some green terminal looking boot screen. Despite all my attempts to force a restart, perform a system restore, drain/charge the battery or whatever Android lets you do by holding in button X while closing one eye and whistling a happy tune, the phone just won't get past that Bootloader exception screen. I'm not an Android guy and since the purpose of the phone was to test apps, the device was required to be as close to stock as possible to adequately replicate the experience someone might have on their own device. By that I mean I didn't "root" the phone or mess with the OS beyond letting Android run all those auto updates it seems to do on a daily basis. I contacted Samsung US support and they said my phone didn't exist as far as they were concerned because it was obviously an international device. They told me to determine the country of origin and arrange service there. How convenient. I looked for some type of local resource that can service phones but it appears all that can be done are screen or battery replacements. Anything heavier has to go to the manufacturer...in Spain...or Antartica...or the Moon. I contacted the Amazon Marketplace vendor (Mobiles International LLC) that I purchased the phone from and they we nice enough in their correspondence and said: "Unfortunately Samsung does not provide warranty service on international unlocked phones. If you sent it to us in Miami, we can get a quote from a Samsung authorized service center to get the phone repaired. It looks like a software issue and should be fixable." I FedEx'd them the phone and waited and waited. After two weeks or so I sent them an email wondering if there was any update. "At this time we have not received a quote unfortunately, the Samsung repair center here cannot repair your device because it is not Latin. We have one other option that we are trying. We will contact you as soon as we get a response." And waited and waited...till about a month and half had passed and got this: "We received the unit back from Samsung this week. They returned the unit saying the warranty was void. We have shipped back to your address yesterday." Huh? Is Samsung saying that I dropped it in a toilet? Or that I used my considerable phone hacking skills to circumvent their awesome software and install my own custom OS? No idea. So the lesson being, read the fine print. International unlocked phones may or may NOT come with a warranty. And even if you work yourself past that little detail and decide to roll the dice...if something goes wrong with your device there appears to be no recourse to have it repaired. Even if you expect to pay for said repair because the assumption being that a repair would cost less than the cost of a new phone there doesn't seem to be any reasonable way to facilitate getting it fixed. Waiting weeks and weeks to get some vague note about the warranty being void is hardly a workable solution.