Boycott PalmOne

Look at what my 2-month-new Zire 72 has become:


a $300 paperweight.


Saw that dark area on the screen? It suddenly appeared out of the blue after 2.5 months of usage. Now this PDA is completely unusable, which means I paid >$100 for each month of its service.

The retailer (Circuit City) is not accepting return as it has passed 14 days. Man, I wished it died within the first 14 days. Apparently PalmOne's quality dept is good enough to figure what units would last longer than that so that you're stucked with it, but not long enough so that you have to replace it soon. Anyway, Circuit City refers me to PalmOne's service.

So what does PalmOne's warranty say? "This warranty excludes (1) physical damage to the surface of the product, including cracks or scratches on the lcd touchscreen or outside casing..." Notice that it excludes all physical damage to the screen, not just the ones caused by the owner! Well, I'm still sending it to PalmOne for repair. Let's pray they don't charge me AND do a good repair job.

So long my $300. So long PalmOne, which is going to lose me as a customer for life.

From what I read and heard, PalmOne really has a serious quality control problem after Palm III. They went too far to cut cost because PDA has become a low profit margin business but this jeopardized their quality and their brandname. (Dunno how reliable his source is but I was told that Treo 600 has a return rate close to 20%! My god!)

I will only buy another Palm OS machine if IBM is back in this business, which I think unlikely. :(

[Update: I did sent it to PalmOne for repair. They didn't charge me anything and sent it back in a week. It has been working fine since. Maybe I'm not boycotting PalmOne after all]