Actually Brightstar is not the one doing the service. Phones being serviced under Brightstar are sent to PhoneWorx which is a 3rd party company to service. How bad? Dust under screen, smudges under screen etc but these all depends on luck coz apparently they have many technicians and depends on which technician yours is being handled by, your luck may be different. The first time i sent mine in under warranty to replace the faulty earpiece was fine, even completed overnight. The 2nd time i sent for service which i pay for due to cracked screen, was crap. You can check a few pages back on my complaints. Don't want to repeat myself again. But in the end they managed to fix my problem at least.

Btw, the Defy is slow due to the stock ROM, flash it to something else and the magic happens! And you said you got bad experience with the dealer, mind sharing? I bought my Defy from him plus after that i bought a Huawei X5 which i returned and exchanged for a brand new set 3 days later coz i suspected it was faulty(which i later found out isn't)

And i see you plan to send yours to warranty. Well, since its a hardware issue, you can go there and specially request to meet the technician and request him to just fix the screen without touching the software bit. Thats what i did when i sent mine for warranty due to the earlier batch having faulty earpieces. I went there, request the counter girl to let me talk to the tech then tell him the situation. He said no problem and can close one eye and just do the warranty. At least thats what happened to me. The phone was completely reflashed before i sent it in and i didn't even bother backing up lol. But still its better if you do since shit happens, like the 2nd time i sent for warranty, once they fix the screen, they discovered they somehow couldn't boot the phone due to unknown reasons and just proceeded in flashing a brand new rom for me

Thank God Google backs up my contacts automagically else someone will be screwed hard.