The Unit

I'll be posting photos of my unit as soon as I can.

Meanwhile (and if someone from Palm is already reading this) here's the serial number: 00VJA41411A3

The countdown...

The Three Year War...

I was looking at the "new" Foleo the other day. I say "new" because the concept of non-X86 subnotebooks is as 1998-ish as 56k modems and Clinton's sex scandal. If it's good or bad I don't know: I (as most) haven't tried this new device so I can't give a hands-on perspective, but I can tell you this: if you get a Foleo and it dies Palm won't give you anything back...

I had my share of problems (BIG ones) with Palm to say this. I had a Palm m105 that had the bad RAM chips so everything I removed the AAA batteries to put new ones in the entire memory got erased. After some research at the time I found several users with the same issue. The thing is (at least in my case) I didn't get a repair or a new unit because my warranty was expired.

I didn't make a serious complaint about it because the unit was still pretty much operational, and except for some long hotsyncs weekly (to reinstall all the stuff that got erased) it was working at least, so I decided to pass on that.

BIG mistake, and even biggest was trusting Palm again...

It was 2004, you could already tell by the number of PocketPCs than the days of the Palm empire were over, yet I decided to get one of the new Zire72 units. Every review site praised the unit so I thought nothing could go wrong.

"...full me twice, same on me" If I made a mistake in all this that was being stupid enough to go and trust Palm with my money even after the issues with the m105.

The thing is, less than a month after I bought the Zire72 the unit literally collapsed: first it was the paint problem a lot of other users had, then it was the battery: it had lost 50% of it's capacity, so now I had a pretty short range with my unit and had to hotsync pretty often 'cause the battery didn't even lasted a day of regular use...

Then there where problems with both the screen (digitalizer) and the camera. The handwriting recognition was just too erratic to use, as was pointing at icons.

One of the reasons why I bought a new Palm was Bluetooth, but as of today I haven't been able to sync my Zire72 with any other BT device, not my laptop, nor my cellphone. In fact most of my devices can't even see the Zire72 to begin with.

But the proverbial kick in the ass was when the RAM died on me. Don't know why, nor how, but one day the RAM started to fail. First it was the classic "you gotta install everything again chump..." issues, then it was the error screens and complete system crashes what rendered my Zire72 unusable...

So I talk with the guys at Palm Support: first they offer to repair the unit, but then I had to give up on my warranty since they wouldn't be responsible if the unit failed again after the repairs.

Then they went and told me they could give me another unit, but it was going to be either a repaired one or a refurbished one, in both cases without box, accessories and no warranty at all either.

So I went to the state, and after 2 years of dealing with bureaucrats, those idiots tell me they can't do anything for me. Then some friends of mine told me to sue Palm, but after talking at a lawyer it was obvious it wasn't the best answer: since I wasn't hurt nor experienced any physical damage due to product malfunction the best I could get with the sue was a brand new unit, but then I would had to pay all the lawyer's bills which is way more than what the unit costed.

I tried to get enough users to make a class-action suit like the one from the Treo users, but since my problem was kinda unique (nor the problem itself but the fact I got almost every possible error with the unit) I couldn't get enough people to make one. Plus there was some other users that had already desisted to continue to fight, mostly because of the craptastic support coming from Palm.

So, it's 2007. In 23 days will be the anniversary of the day I got mugged by Palm Inc.

2 days ago I called Palm again and hear this: they offered to give me a discount (yeah, I've to pay again) on a brand new Zire72!.

First of all, I'm surprised they still have stock of a 3 years-old unit around, and second that they even dare to charge me on an obsolete unit that's not even on sale at the Palm store anymore.

This my friends, is corporate greed...

So since I have exhausted almost every traditional way I had to get a new unit or my money back, I decided to bite back the only way I can against a corporation: I'm making my case public, so at least those why still have any doubts on the reliability of the Palm brand can rest assure that they made the right decision by NOT buying a Palm unit.

Thanks for reading.