The study of after-sales service satisfaction found that 68 percent of cellphone users have had their handsets repaired while 28 percent have had their handsets repaired at least three times.

Vague standards for repair fees, unclear reasons for malfunctions and excessively high prices for components were the top three complaints.

Shenzhen city, neighbouring Hong Kong, had thousands of authorized maintenance stores and cellphone producers had difficulties in controlling these scattered and small stores nationwide, the report said.

To make things worse, maintenance stores tended to delay repairs till the quality guarantee expired so they could charge more than the repair fees that handset producers give during the guarantee period, it said.

Meanwhile, to keep the maintenance market under control, cellphone producers usually hold key components, such as screens and mainboards, which greatly extend the repair time, it said.

CCID Consulting found that 41.6 percent of cellphone users wanted to watch television on their handset, while 38.3 percent wanted to download music, but were dissatisfied with their phones' abilities in this regard.

The five-month survey covered 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions with almost 27,000 valid samples, CCID Consulting said.

Consumers showed greatest satisfaction with the after-sales services of Motorola, Lenovo, Nokia, Haier, Sony-Ericsson and TCL, the report said.

Beijing-based CCID Consulting was the first Chinese consulting firm to list in the Growth Enterprise Market of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It is directly affiliated to the China Center for Information Industry Development (CCID Group).

China has 487 million handset users with six million new users every month, according to the Ministry of Information Industry.

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