TNL.net

Could Tech Support Undo Palm?

27th
52

I’ve been a sup­porter of Palm for a very long time (in fact, I’ve been a sup­porter of Palm for longer than the com­pany itself has existed as I sup­ported it through the first iter­a­tion of the com­pany, its sub­se­quent acqui­si­tion by US Robot­ics, then 3COM, then its return to a new com­pany base, its merger with Hand­spring and its cur­rent iter­a­tion) so when my last Treo (an unlocked Treo 680) started hav­ing issues, I thought that I would go through the usual pro­ce­dure: call tech sup­port, walk through the ques­tion­naire about soft and hard resets, and then get down to the busi­ness of get­ting a replace­ment unit. Except this time, it wasn’t to be.

I was first walked through the script by employee C13763, who balked when I told her that I didn’t know the exact date of pur­chase of my device. Hav­ing pur­chased the device from the palm US store, I thought they could look that up but I dis­cov­ered that it wasn’t the case. Keep­ing her on the line while I tried to login in the store, I dis­cov­ered that palm no longer had any trace of any accounts of mine on their site. With 4 palm devices bought over the last 3 years, I was sur­prised by that fact, espe­cially after check­ing the address on the wel­come email (palm has a tra­di­tion of send­ing you a wel­come note to their world every time you buy another device) and ask­ing for a pass­word to be reset for the email address I had received emails at from Palm.

But at that point, I could say it was all basi­cally my fault for not keep­ing good records. I asked for for­give­ness and gave a date based on my rough remem­ber­ance. It was around the end of the year and the Treo 680 has been intro­duced at a show in New York only a few days before. So I looked up the rough time­line (device intro­duced late Novem­ber 2006 and released around Decem­ber 2006) and gave a date (Jan­u­ary 1, 2007). I knew the date was wrong as I had got­ten the device later than that but fig­ured I needed to give them a date that was within the range of war­ranty and on the out­side of the date I bought the device.

After doing so, I was told that I needed to do a hard reset (I had already walked through that) and indulged the call cen­ter per­son (I fig­ure they get enough abuse as is). That, of course, did not solve the prob­lem since it was a hard­ware issue (speaker blown off due to the fact that the vol­ume set­ting on the palm, if set too high blows off the speak­ers and the fact that the vol­ume set­ting but­tons do not lock with the rest of the but­tons on the device, ensur­ing that any type of shak­ing in pock­ets or bags will ensure that your vol­ume is either set to the top or bot­tom set­ting most of the time). After another 15 min­utes of walk­ing through the sce­nario, I was told that the replace­ment unit would cost me $299.

$299 would not be much of an issue, with one pos­si­ble excep­tion: the retail price for a brand new, unlocked, Treo 680 is $379. The street price ranges from $200 to $300. A new unit comes with a one year war­ranty on all parts. A replace­ment unit does not.

The mes­sage this sends to cus­tomers is that once you’re a cus­tomer, you’re hooked and there­fore the com­pany is going to try to milk any profit it can out of you. As a share­holder, I thought this was the wrong mes­sage so I asked employee C13763 to trans­fer me to her supe­rior. After some going back and forth, I was finally trans­fered to employee C11329, a “senior tech­ni­cian” to whom I referred my case num­ber (case num­ber 1–511-464–84488) before con­tin­u­ing the discussion.

I first voiced my con­cern about the fact that there was a prob­lem in terms of locat­ing sales data from their own servers. Since I had bought the device from Palm’s web­site and I had given my ser­ial num­ber while on the pre­vi­ous call, I thought it odd that they could not locate the date of pur­chase of the device (espe­cially since they con­sider it such vital data for cus­tomer ser­vice) . I was told that since my device was sold on Jan­u­ary 1, 2007, the date I had given only a few min­utes ear­lier to the pre­vi­ous call cen­ter per­son, it was out of war­ranty. I’m writ­ing this on Decem­ber 27, 2007 and, the last time I checked, a one year war­ranty gen­er­ally extends 365 days from the date of pur­chase. My con­cern as a share­holder now turned to anger and frus­tra­tion. With 3 other bro­ken palm devices in front of me (2 of them my own fault so I won’t even bother talk­ing to Palm about those), I thought that I could be con­sid­ered a solid cus­tomer. But now I was told that war­ranties were not real and pay­ing $199 (a drop in price of $100 in only a few min­utes since talk­ing to the pre­vi­ous per­son) was going to solve my prob­lem. In the past, bro­ken devices were repaired for $100 so this was get­ting closer to real­ity but I wanted to talk to some­one more senior about two prob­lems: first, it seemed that one can give any date and it won’t be checked (or maybe it will) and two, if it is checked, war­ranty terms do not apply for a full year.

So I asked employee C11329 to be trans­fered to her man­ager. She told me she was the most senior per­son at Palm. I asked her again politely to trans­fer me to her man­ager. She told me she had none. I asked to be trans­fered to the per­son that was review­ing her work, giv­ing her assign­ments, etc.. I was told she had none. I told her I felt that was odd as, apart from the chair­man and CEO, I didn’t know of any­one in a com­pany not hav­ing a man­ager. She told me she was the CEO.

For a sec­ond, I paused. “You’re the CEO of Palm, Inc.?” I asked again, not really believ­ing what I was hear­ing. “Yes, I am” she replied, now with a defi­ant tone. “So you’re telling me you’re Ed Col­li­gan?” I asked. “I am the CEO and that’s all you need to know.”

Well, turns out I was now in a very odd sit­u­a­tion. I had been at sev­eral indus­try events where Ed Col­li­gan spoke (includ­ing a num­ber of prod­uct launches from Palm) and, as far as my mem­ory was con­cerned, his voice was nei­ther fem­i­nine nor did it sound south-Asian in its inflec­tion. My mem­ory might have been play­ing games on me but I was pretty sure I was not talk­ing to the CEO of Palm.

“Do you mind if I start record­ing this call? I’d like to get your answer to my ques­tion about being CEO on an audio record as I’m hav­ing a hard time believ­ing it” I asked. The first part of this ques­tion is a stan­dard I was taught in jour­nal­ism school: if you’re going to record a call, first ask if it’s OK to do so. Laws apply­ing to phone tap­ing are a com­plex mess of reg­u­la­tions with lit­tle over­lap between dif­fer­ent juris­dic­tions: how­ever, if both par­ties to a con­ver­sa­tion agree to the tap­ing of that con­ver­sa­tion, it is gen­er­ally rec­og­nized as OK to do so.

Obvi­ously, I was deal­ing with some­one who knew (or guessed) that I would not legally be allowed to record the con­ver­sa­tion so she replied that “no, that would be ille­gal”. I was stuck so I asked her to trans­fer me to her man­ager again. She said no. I asked again with the same result. After another 15 min­utes of back and forth, I finally fig­ured that she being CEO, she could trans­fer me to any­one in the com­pany so I asked to be trans­fered to the company’s gen­eral coun­sel. The call dropped. I let the line run for another few min­utes fig­ur­ing that maybe it was tak­ing time for the trans­fer to occur but no, the line went dead.

After a few hours, I real­ized that while my expe­ri­ence had been hor­ri­ble, I may have found a great story: PALM, the stock, is not doing so hot. Palm, the com­pany is hav­ing its own issues, as are Palm the devices. In the past, the sav­ing grace in all this was that the cus­tomer sup­port was very good and decent. So the ques­tion is whether tech sup­port (or other forms of hor­ri­ble cus­tomer inter­ac­tions) could be the straw that breaks Palm’s back. I called Palm’s PR agency to ask some ques­tions about this but most of the peo­ple are on vaca­tion. One of their agency’s PR peo­ple told me that she’d pass the mes­sage on so we’ll see what happens.

On a per­sonal note, I’m join­ing the many oth­ers who are aban­don­ing palm the device. I am also, like Mary Hod­der, regret­ting all the rec­om­men­da­tions I made. I’m now shop­ping for another device and would wel­come any rec­om­men­da­tion. I also wouldn’t mind get­ting some infor­ma­tion about how other peo­ple feel about tech sup­port not only at Palm but also at other unlocked devices sell­ers. Is unlocked a cat­e­gory of the mar­ket that most ven­dors dis­miss, reserv­ing their best ser­vices for 3rd party mobile providers and is it some­thing that might change in the future? I don’t know but what I do know is that I am now part of the group of peo­ple who must say: “Don’t ever buy a Palm device.”

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52 Comments

  1. 1Nathan Weinberg — December 28, 2007 at 1:20 am

    Tris­tan, what right do you have to com­plain? You got to speak to the CEO of the com­pany! That’s great ser­vice! :-D

    Seri­ously, though, it’s good to hear your expe­ri­ence, ter­ri­ble as it was, as I’m in mid­dle of prepar­ing a review of the Cen­tro. I’ll note your expe­ri­ence in my review. Hope­fully some­one at Palm will hear of your arti­cle and get this cleared up. In my expe­ri­ence, the PR folks at Palm are extremely helpful.

  2. 2Sebastian — December 28, 2007 at 7:20 am

    After hav­ing tried all of the plat­forms for long peri­ods of time, my recomen­da­tions are: Black­berry or Nokia/Symbian, for­get about Win­dows Mobile, and maybe an iPhone might be bet­ter (or worse) for you. I see iPhones as the best phones, but not so good smart­phones, but that might change in feb­ru­ary with the release of their SDK. The berries are the most “palm-like, they “just work” and they are cheaper. Sym­bian devices are more pow­er­ful but expensive.

  3. 3Paul Campy — December 28, 2007 at 9:10 am

    It’s been a shame to see Palm snatch defeat and ‘me too sta­tus’ from the jaws of vic­tory & indus­try lead­ing inno­va­tion over the years. I was an early Palm adopter, pas­sion­ately evan­ge­lis­tic to my Win­dows CE friends up to the point where Palm / Palm One / Hand­spring etc let both the hard­ware and OS stag­nate and struggle.

    Never had to use Palm’s cus­tomer sup­port; a shame that if that was its sav­ing grace, that they’ve now lost a sup­porter and long term cus­tomer through shoddy service.

  4. 4Tristan Louis — December 28, 2007 at 11:10 am

    @Nathan: Funny but it looks like many peo­ple are will­ing to share their expe­ri­ence pri­vately about hor­ri­ble cus­tomer ser­vice at Palm. So I guess the press is doing OK with it but not reg­u­lar con­sumer. On the other hand, the cen­tro looks like a nice device. I wish they made it for GSM net­works :) It was going to be my next device (a GSM cen­tro when it comes out) but now I’m through with Palm.

  5. 5CB — December 28, 2007 at 4:00 pm

    One word: iPhone.

  6. 6Ben — December 28, 2007 at 9:47 pm

    My exper­ince with palm tech ‘sup­port’ is noth­ing short of hor­ri­ble; they are rude, unaware of rel­e­vant con­sumer pro­tec­tion leg­is­la­tion, and have con­vinced me that I will never again be a palm cus­tomer. I’m pretty sure that palm is cir­cling the drain as well speak.

  7. 7Tristan Louis — December 28, 2007 at 10:11 pm

    @all: thanks for the info so far. I for­got to include a cou­ple of facts:
    1. I’m a mac user so OSX sync will be essen­tial
    2. I’m also more of a data user than voice user on the device so email inte­gra­tion is key.
    3. I travel around the world so the phone has to be unlock­able
    4. I want to play MP3 and sync with itunes as my podcast.

    Based on this, I see my choices as rel­a­tively lim­ited. It looks like the choices of smart­phones for mac users boil down to basi­cally three choices:
    1. an iphone: but the down­side is that, at the cur­rent time, it would have to be tied to AT&T if I want to use it “legally“
    2. a treo: and we all know I’m not get­ting one of those ever again
    3. a black­berry: and I’m not wild about the Pearl’s lack of full keyboard

    so nei­ther choice is per­fect. From my end it boils down to unlocked iphone vs. unlocked black­berry. I’m lean­ing towards the iphone because of the slick­ness of the web browser on it…

  8. 8Donald C. Kirker — December 29, 2007 at 4:29 am

    Def­i­nitely sounds like out­sourced tech support.

    A dou­ble edged sword. Either you pay the big bucks and time to do the tech sup­port your­self (i.e. more resources that a com­pany must have) and gain a poten­tial increase in cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, or you out­source to cut costs and save resources, and poten­tially get a dip in cus­tomer satisfaction.

    I have never been happy with the out­sourced sup­port that I have got­ten. A lit­tle from Palm, but I even­tu­ally after a try got some­body who han­dled me bet­ter, and Dell. The real issue at hand (at least the one pre­sented) is with out­sourc­ing. It is unfor­tu­nate that many out­sourced tech sup­port cen­ters are made up of peo­ple who are trained to be like com­put­ers and not trained to under­stand the tech­nol­ogy (AND their com­pany struc­ture…) and be like humans.

    Sorry to hear that your expe­ri­ence was sour. :(

  9. 9Ben — December 29, 2007 at 5:57 am

    What about some­thing like the black­berry curve? I believe it has a full key­board. I’d wait until iPhone 2.0 comes out; which may be soonish.

  10. 10Jeff — December 29, 2007 at 8:55 pm

    If you travel much, the iPhone is out­stand­ing. The mobile Inter­net expe­ri­ence can’t be beat.

  11. 11Mogden — December 29, 2007 at 9:04 pm

    You’d have to be a lunatic not to buy an iPhone at this point.

  12. 12Rener — December 29, 2007 at 9:24 pm

    I had a sim­i­larly bizarre prob­lem with Palm tech sup­port ear­lier this year.

    After order­ing my Treo 680 and not receiv­ing the bonus pack offered on the web, I called in and was promised it would be sent out express the next day. It didn’t arrive so I called back and was again promised it would arrive the next day. Still didn’t.

    I called a third time and was told my case was under review and I would hear back. A week later, when I still hadn’t heard back I called again and was told, good news, my case had been approved and was again promised that the bonus pack would be sent express the next day. It didn’t arrive.

    I called a fifth time and now told my case had been rejected. I asked to speak to a man­ager and was trans­fered to Jose. After an ardu­ous back and forth, where I basi­cally asked if Palm hon­ored the promises made by their pre­vi­ous sup­port techs, Jose agreed to send me the bonus pack (you guess it) express and said he would call back with a track­ing number.

    Jose didn’t call back so I placed a sixth call. This time the sup­port tech said they had no record of my pre­vi­ous calls (!). I asked for another man­ager and was given some­one else (not Jose) who refused to send me my miss­ing bonus pack out­right. I asked her to check the notes on my pre­vi­ous calls (and gave her ticket num­bers) and she claimed there were none, and that I had never called Palm before. I asked to speak to Jose and she claimed there was no one at Palm sup­port by that name. He didn’t exist. I got no where.

    Out of sheer frus­tra­tion I turned to the blog­sphere, Digg, and var­i­ous Treo forums. Palm was con­tacted by sev­eral peo­ple, and lo and behold, the next day I received a call from Jose, who sud­denly re-existed, and who gave me a track­ing num­ber for my bonus pack, which I finally received a short time thereafter.

    I had also been a long­time Palm user, through the Palm V, Hand­spring, Treo 600, and 680. But their sup­port, includ­ing lying to a long­time cus­tomer and fail­ing to honor the promises of their own sup­port techs, which is beyond egre­gious, I washed my hands of them. (I’m now enjoy­ing life with an iPhone).

    There’s never any excuse for poor support.

  13. 13Jeremy Clifton — December 29, 2007 at 9:31 pm

    I finally aban­doned my last Pal­mOS device a few months ago, used a Win Mobile device for a cou­ple of months, and finally set­tled on a Black­Berry about six weeks ago. I thought I’d miss using a sty­lus to enter text (which was the main rea­son I’d gone with Win Mobile in the first place) but I quickly found that I really didn’t miss it at all.

  14. 14Trevor — December 29, 2007 at 9:31 pm

    mobius your black­berry expe­ri­ence sounds ter­ri­ble, put me right off them

  15. 15Eric — December 29, 2007 at 10:08 pm

    I’ve been look­ing for a replace­ment for my Treo as well. I have a 650, but it looks like there’s noth­ing out there that’s actu­ally bet­ter than this four-year-old phone. Even iPhone users get jeal­ous when I break out my stereo blue­tooth head­set and con­trol my media player using it while my phone is out of sight.

    What other phone allows me to:
    Use a full sized SD card slot*
    Use an open source tool­chain to develop native apps
    Install third party appli­ca­tions that do not have to be autho­rized by the phone man­u­fac­turer or phone net­work
    Run J2ME apps writ­ten for other devices
    Watch video and lis­ten to music using the player of your choice
    Browse the web using the player of your choice
    Install cus­tom ring­tones I’ve made
    Dial and type with full tac­tile feed­back
    Use a touch screen rather than a clunky joy­stick or arrow keys
    Trans­fer data using infrared AND blue­tooth
    Sync with my com­puter over USB AND blue­tooth
    Use an A2DP wire­less head­set
    Use SSH with keys or passwords

    The only things wrong with my Treo are:
    Slow inter­net con­nec­tion
    No wifi
    Apps can crash the phone

    *I use the full-sized sd card to e-mail pho­tos taken with my dig­i­tal cam­era. It’s so easy to just pop the card out of the cam­era and into the phone. It also lets me carry a large library of audio­books and music with me. I just swap cards to change my selection

    I had high hopes for the iPhone, but it costs more and does less.

  16. 16Ian — December 29, 2007 at 10:19 pm

    I will say this, if you’re on leop­ard black­berry sync­ing is a bit of a pain. don’t install pocketmac.

  17. 17J Lane — December 29, 2007 at 10:44 pm

    flyingtroll.comAs you seem to be able to get the CEO on the phone when you need tech sup­port, go for an iPhone — then you’ll be guar­an­teed an impromptu inter­view with Steve Jobs when the time comes ;-)

    Seri­ously though, I did a bit of a round-up based on my expe­ri­ences here:

    http://www.flyingtroll.com/2007/12/20/touchscreen-due-in-2008/

    I’m cur­rently an iPhone user (and Cana­dian) so I’m one of those ter­ri­ble unlocker types. The only down­side is that if my device does go south, I’ll have a heck of a time with tech sup­port — but I’m will­ing to take the chance. The iPhone is hands-down the best phone and best PDA I’ve ever used. I don’t know if I’d be say­ing the same thing if I didn’t have all of the addi­tional appli­ca­tions installed. You pointed to mail as being impor­tant to you — the Black­berry e-mail client is crap com­pared to the e-mail client on the iPhone. That and the con­stant buzzing of the bloody thing is so dis­tract­ing, I can’t stand “push” e-mail.

  18. 18Tristan Louis — December 29, 2007 at 10:47 pm

    @all: I’m going to try my hand at an unlocked iphone. I’ve been using a black­berry for work for a while now and find it inad­e­quate as a phone. I’ve got an 8800 right now and I find it OK but not great. Since synch­ing with the mac is key for me, I’m going to go with the device that, the­o­ret­i­cally, ought to do the best job of that and that ought to be an iphone.

    Now on to the next chal­lenge (once I receive the 4Gb iphone I just bought on ebay, fig­ur­ing that 4Gb iphones will NOT have the lat­est OS): jail­break­ing and unlocking.

  19. 19geekboy — December 29, 2007 at 11:08 pm

    I got a good chuckle out of the asser­tion that the iPhone is some­how inept at the task of being a smart­phone because it is “crip­pled” … I carry both a Black­berry 87xx and an iPhone and when it comes to being a “smart­phone” the iPhone wins hands down. It trounces the Black­berry on vir­tu­ally every func­tion that makes a smart­phone a smart­phone — phone, web, read­ing and man­age­ment of email, pho­tos, and per­sonal infor­ma­tion man­ager. The only place the Black­berry comes out on top is — and it has no com­pe­ti­tion at all in this regard — is for retriev­ing imme­di­ate email. Once you have the email, well, it pretty much sucks — folder man­age­ment, mes­sage man­age­ment, attach­ments, all of it.

    And really, I dont see the prob­lem in wait­ing to get my email when I have a chance to sit down and read it.

    The Black­berry COULD be a great smart­phone if RIM had any sort of HIG strat­egy — but until they do, the stag­ger­ingly bad inter­faces to the apps will always make using it a painful expe­ri­ence at best.

    So why do I carry one along with my iPhone? Because my employer, Research In Motion (yes, I am Cana­dian as well), pro­vided it and seems to frown on us using any­thing else at work. They are sort of dra­con­ian that way.

    I used Palm/PalmPilot prod­ucts (and was, quite frankly, a zealot) all the way back to the USR days, and I can get Black­berry model that I want, but when push comes to shove (and with my own money involved) I carry the iPhone. Read into that what you will.

  20. 20Guillermo Esteves — December 29, 2007 at 11:10 pm

    May I rec­om­mend that you take a look at the Nokia E61i? I don’t know how it com­pares to a Treo or a Black­berry since I’ve never owned either, but it has a full QWERTY key­pad, decent email soft­ware, good browsers (the Webkit-based default browser, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile), iSync sup­port, Wi-Fi, and lots of third-party software.

    Not as pretty or easy to use as an iPhone, but it gets the job done.

  21. 21Ben — December 29, 2007 at 11:46 pm

    Surely, dear geek­boy, peo­ple have been fired for less than that. Espe­cially if RIM is as dra­con­ian as you say.

  22. 22BRosenberg — December 30, 2007 at 4:26 am

    I’m a Mac user and I have an unlocked 8320 from T-Mobile. I love this phone. I thas Wifi and can do VoIP calls. It syncs pretty good with my MBP using Miss­ing Sync for Black­berry (pay­ware). I’ve had NO trou­ble with it at all and it has a full key­board. Please do check it out. You might want to lurk a bit on pinstack.com because I’ve found those folks quite help­ful for info about the Blackberry.

  23. 23Pinchies — December 30, 2007 at 7:16 am

    Palm really needs to have a solid cust-service if it is still sell­ing flawed prod­ucts. Being from Aust, I didn’t come under the class action on the faulty m105 and needed a new unit after a replace­ment broke. My t3 dig­i­tizer went up the creek too. Luck­ily, after 3 bat­tery replace­ments off ebay, it is still run­ning… with tape over the loose screws.

    I have a great phone, so does any­one have any sug­ges­tions? iPod Touch + SDK perhaps?

  24. 24Damjan — December 30, 2007 at 9:42 am

    Or get a Nokia E90. Has full qwerty key­board, GPS, nav­i­ga­tion, MP3 player, Flash, Java ME, RealPlayer, excel­lent Email, Webkit (safari) based Web Browser, 3G (UMTS and HSPDA!, 7Mbit/s), WiFi, FM Radio… I have it and I am very pleased with it.

  25. 25Zakintosh — December 30, 2007 at 10:10 am

    won­der­fully help­ful, read­ing all this while i am wait­ing to switch from my sony-ericsson p910 … sadly will have to aban­don my hand­writ­ing entry option that i use a lot. won­der why apple doesn’t have that, given that they were in that game very early with the new­ton. yes, it will have to be an ‘unlocked’ iPhone 2.0 since they are not offer­ing the legal option in pak­istan yet. as a mac user i can’t really han­dle bad/ugly inter­faces, so win­doze thin­gies are out, anyway.

    btw, the lady could be the ceo… of the south indian out­fit palm has out­sourced tech sup­port to. pos­si­ble, no? she’d cer­tainly hate to have your record­ing played back to ed.

    oh, and sad as the predica­ment must be for you, your expe­ri­ence and rener’s read like spoofs.

    good luck

  26. 26Kim Thesiger — December 30, 2007 at 10:30 am

    I sec­ond the Nokia E61 recom­men­ta­tion. I was a long term Palm sup­porter as well and got equaly fed up with their lack of progress.

    The 3rd party soft­ware mar­ket is not as mature as for Palm but the device is per­fe­cetly ade­quate and the hard­ware works flaw­lessly. iSync works with­out any prob­lems and Mark/Space are bring­ing out ‘Miss­ing Sync for Sym­bian’ in the New Year.

    The iPhone inter­ests me but I will wait until it is open to 3rd party soft­ware and can be used on any network.

  27. 27rener — December 30, 2007 at 10:49 am

    As a for­mer Treo 600 and 680 owner, here’s what I’ve found with the iPhone:

    Pros:

    1) Doesn’t crash or hang daily when mak­ing or receiv­ing calls — this really is the killer app com­pared to Treo
    2) Media man­age­ment is a dream (man­age­ment with pTunes and Core Player became a has­sle to the point I stopped doing it)
    3) No need to run third party apps (Gx5) just to fake a mod­ern UI.
    4) Soft key­board is much faster and bet­ter for me than the Treo’s (which was hard and rounded, slip­pery and took too much effort to push — espe­cially for the month or so I had a wrist injury)
    5) The new mail in Leop­ard is the first time I’ve ever used To Dos or Notes, and they synch via IMAP to the iPhone
    6) Has a web browser so well devel­oped I often use it rather than go to the trou­ble of start­ing up my Mac.
    7) Has a screen good enough that I watch some TV shows/movies on the iPhone rather than on TV.

    Cons:

    1) I miss shoot­ing video
    2) I miss IR/BT file trans­fer
    3) Typ­ing to find con­tact
    4) Dial by photo (3rd party)

    Feb’s SDK may fix all the above for me.

    Black­berry was never an option as he key­board, to me, feels dodgy and the idea of not only run­ning behind Exchange with a RIM server, but RIM itself being a single-point-of-failure for email work­ing is just so wrong from an IT pov that it’s lit­er­ally a non-starter.

  28. 28Hans — December 30, 2007 at 11:14 am

    I was a loyal Palm cus­tomer from the 3com model through the Treo 650.

    My iPhone brings me the same plea­sure of a fluid, just-works and isn’t-in-my-way tool as I have not expe­ri­enced with Palm since the Vx.

  29. 29Eric — December 30, 2007 at 1:29 pm

    I’m a pho­to­jour­nal­ist that does a fair bit of trav­el­ing around the world. I took my Black­berry Pearl to India, Kenya, Tan­za­nia, Zanz­ibar and never had a bit of prob­lem using it. Even on the far side of the island of Zanz­ibar where Inter­net is dialup and even slow by those standards!

    I am dump­ing the Black­berry for an iPhone as soon as I can. The func­tion­al­ity of the Black­berry is fine, but noth­ing to shout about. Com­pat­i­bil­ity with Inter­na­tional phone sys­tems is beyond reproach. But that’s not enough for me. My com­pany pays for 10 min­utes a day back home no mat­ter what phone I use.

    Check the num­bers. Sat­is­fac­tion rates: iPhone 82%, Black­berry 51%, all the rest much lower. iPhones out­sell all Win­dows Media phones com­bined, notwith­stand­ing Ballmer’s hyper­bolic claims. Palm is los­ing ground fast. (Sell that stock!)

    The iPhone doesn’t have every­thing, but almost every­thing can come in soft­ware updates. Try that with any other phone. Want to add voice dial­ing to other phones? For­get it. iPhones? It will happen.

    I truly wanted to like my Black­berry. But it’s just not half the phone I had hoped it would be. T-Mobile’s web brows­ing expe­ri­ence stinks. Even with Opera. Noth­ing can touch the iPhone. (I don’t any money boost­ing anybody’s products.)

    Do your­self a favor and at least try one.

  30. 30JR — December 30, 2007 at 2:17 pm

    As an owner of a LifeDrive, Palm’s poorly exe­cuted attempt at a high-end PDA, I can affirm that Palm is indeed cir­cling the drain. It never has worked well, and some­times doesn’t work at all. Palm could have owned the PDA mar­ket and been a major player in the cell-phone mar­ket, but instead it’ll only be a few more years before busi­ness books will be dis­sect­ing the demise of Palm. It’s a shame.

  31. 31Mark — December 30, 2007 at 8:14 pm

    Ignore the iPhone fans. HTC makes some amaz­ing win­dows mobile phones, has excel­lent ser­vice and sup­port, and actu­ally cares about their customers.

    Check out the TyTN II, aka the AT&T “Tilt”.

  32. 32Interloper — December 31, 2007 at 7:26 am

    Do NOT ignore the iPhone fans. Based on your descrip­tion of your needs, the iPhone is the best choice. As for the HTC touch phone or Nokia N95, I think that as an Apple user, you would find both kludgy, with too many fea­tures that do not work well.

  33. 33Stephen Fleming — December 31, 2007 at 9:20 am

    As a first-ninety-days Mac user (mean­ing I bought my first Mac in April 1984, and have been a cer­ti­fied Apple fan­boy ever since), I aston­ished my friends and co-workers last month by replac­ing my aging Treo 600… with a Treo 680.

    Yes, I’ve played with an iPhone. Heck, I *own* an iPod Touch, which is the “iPhone with­out the phone.” I’ve played with a Black­berry Curve and a Nokia E61i, and an HTC with a slide­out key­board (don’t remem­ber the model num­ber). And, even with Palm’s crim­i­nal mis­man­age­ment and stu­pid­ity, I still bought another Palm.

    Eric, above, gave some of the best rea­sons. (He missed Mobipocket, which I use daily.) I couldn’t find any­thing else that had the right bal­ance of fea­tures of the Palm. Yeah, it’s thick as a brick, but I really don’t care. (I even made it thicker by buy­ing the Sei­dio battery.)

    I’d really like to think that the iPhone 2.0 will solve all my issues and let me switch. But the lack of a key­board is painful for me on my iPod Touch. Yes, it does a decent job of guess­ing *words*, but not email addresses or URLs. And the two-handed nature of the iPhone doesn’t work for me… I do a lot of tex­ting when walk­ing or dri­ving. (OK, let’s be accu­rate: while sit­ting behind the wheel of a car sit­ting per­fectly still in Atlanta traf­fic. I think that’s accept­able to the safety-conscious.)

    But, Lord, I would like to be in charge of Palm about three years ago. Could have gone through the com­pe­ti­tion with fire and sword…

  34. 34DWM — December 31, 2007 at 10:29 am

    I recently had prob­lems when my first Treo 700p was dam­aged by last sum­mers firmware update.
    It was replaced by another 700p that sub­se­quently had prob­lems. I know have a 755p after speak­ing directly with Palm’s legal depart­ment. This ver­sion of the Palm is ok and minor improve­ment over the 700p, but it still projects sounds from it’s speaker even when the device is on vibrate. The sounds are like touch tone sounds you used to hear on TV wherein some­one was send­ing a burst of cod­ing com­mands to some device. Any­how Cus­tomer Ser­vice was no help until I got a hold of the legal depart­ment which put me into the cor­po­rate sup­port queue. Palm appears to have out­sourced it’s help for the “peas­ants” to India. I was assisted by peo­ple in the US — Florida in fact and sub­se­quently got the replace­ment phone, etc. Later I found out that my old 700p the sec­ond one was hav­ing sync­ing prob­lems as well. Out­side of the noise issue the 755p is ok now.

    I loved Palm, but I don’t any longer after my recent tech sup­port expe­ri­ence. I’m wait­ing and watch­ing the iPhone. If a dev kit comes out and the phone goes to 3g w/ modem sup­port. I’m history!!

    Cur­rently the EVDO, phone as modem and all my Palm soft­ware is the only thing hold­ing me to this phone.
    Might be time to sell all that stuff.

  35. 35Lou — December 31, 2007 at 12:22 pm

    I’ve had two Treos and a few Win­Mo­bile phones. While your Treo might occa­sion­ally frus­trate you; any Win­Mo­bile phone you’ll use will infu­ri­ate you. I bought a Black­berry 8830 last sum­mer, not wish­ing to be an AT&T cus­tomer. The email is great, and the phone works, like all the time. Never hung, never froze. But the browser is weak and, as noted else­where, HTML email is usu­ally unread­able. After years of being a loyal and happy Ver­i­zon cus­tomer, I bought an iPhone. The next day, I bought one for my wife. Is it per­fect? No. For my needs, run­ning a small busi­ness, semi-heavy email, heavy phone usage (3000+ min­utes a month, it’s my only busi­ness phone) it works great. AT&T’s cus­tomer ser­vice has been respon­sive (unlike my last expe­ri­ence sev­eral years ago). I’m trust­ing Apple to con­tinue to improve the email app; which is, for me, the biggest weak­ness on this phone.
    Palm is out of busi­ness and doesn’t know it yet. For my needs, the BB was a state of the art email device, period. I think you’ll be happy with your iPhone.

  36. 36Todd — December 31, 2007 at 4:22 pm

    This was funny, and would be even fun­nier if it weren’t true… Palm can’t afford bad cus­tomer ser­vice — espe­cially a bad cus­tomer ser­vice story that makes it’s rounds on the ‘Net.

    I have a Treo 700p and I am happy with Ver­i­zon, but as soon as the iPhone sup­ports 3G, I’m switching.

  37. 37Tristan Louis — December 31, 2007 at 4:34 pm

    @Stephen: I used to be like you but the Treo 680 has been more prob­lem rid­den for me than any other devices. Like you, it was a replace­ment for a Treo 600, which was a replace­ment for a Treo 80, which was a replace­ment for a hand­spring and phone mod­ule, which was a replace­ment for a Palm Vx, which was a replace­ment for a Palm V, which was a replace­ment for… well you get the idea. How­ever, a cou­ple of things ini­tially ran­kled me in terms of the Treo 680. The new phone inter­face (which they have since smartly aban­doned for a return to the Treo 600/650 phone inter­face) was a dis­as­ter in terms of usabil­ity. There also seem to be more reset prob­lems than with any other Treo I have used and this was my 4th replace­ment unit due to blown speaker (that is, 4th Treo 680 replace­ment unit, which is a record con­sid­er­ing how long the device has been out). With all that, I still stayed loyal but this call was the straw that broke the camel’s back on my end.

  38. 38Tristan Louis — December 31, 2007 at 4:43 pm

    @HTC and win mobile users: well, one of my pri­mary require­ments is synch­ing with a mac so win mobile is pretty much out (plus, I’m not wild about the win­mo­bile inter­face. I know it’s come a long way since Win­dows CE (and inci­den­tally, owned one of the first win­dows CE device when they were first released at Comdex) but it still not doing it for me).

    So, after much though, I’m tak­ing the plunge on the iphone. It has two major down­sides:
    1. no tech sup­port as I will be unlock­ing it to run on non-AT&T net­works (and yes, that’s net­works plural as I use T-mobile in the US but pick up local SIMs when I travel over­seas)
    2. no key­board, which is the biggest draw­back, in my view, but most of the iphone users I know don’t seem to worry too much about it so I’m tak­ing the plunge.

  39. 39Terence P — December 31, 2007 at 7:52 pm

    I had a prob­lem a few years ago with a Treo 650 and dealt with overseas/outsourced tech sup­port who were nei­ther help­ful or kind. I was blamed for installing 3rd party apps as the rea­son for the inter­mit­tent crash­ing (which we all know was a huge issue for Treos) and told my war­ranty can be voided for hav­ing those apps, which I know is not true. A let­ter to the Bet­ter Busi­ness Bureau got a Palm rep­re­sen­ta­tive with some author­ity call­ing me to apol­o­gize and offered to send me a brand new 650 with a fresh 1-year war­ranty. I sold the 650 and got a BB 8700g and have loved it because it works over­seas, works with Gmail and Gmaps, can do AOL IM, and a host of other things in a rel­a­tively sim­ple man­ner. Best of all, it’s a frac­tion of the Treo’s weight and has crashed less than five times in the past two years.

  40. 40NuShrike — January 1, 2008 at 8:33 am

    I went from a Palm III, to Sony 610C, to NR70v to NX80. Then to the T|X because I thought I lost the NX80. The only things Pal­mOS really still has nailed down well is PIM func­tion­al­ity. Any­thing else, and I’ve moved on to the HTC Kaiser (aka Tilt) since nobody took the NX80 to the log­i­cal unpar­al­leled con­clu­sion of today’s Japan­ese phones.

    You can sync very well with the Mac using Miss­ing Sync with WinMobile.

    The Kaiser gives me GPS func­tion­al­ity and Garmin to use when I travel in Japan, com­pat­i­bil­ity with today’s phone net­works (read 3G) all over the world (on Soft­bank right now), Metro but no Teal­phone, free soft­ware for QR code sup­port and almost as rich a soft­ware library as Pal­mOS, data and Blue­tooth sta­bil­ity the T|X never had, and instant drop-in pro­gram­ma­bil­ity with Visual Studio.

    You still get the Gmail, Gmaps and what­ever else Google puts out; IM through var­i­ous options, remote desk­top, and syn­chro­niza­tion with Out­look — although none with work because they only sup­port Black­berry and I’m not pay­ing extra for BB Connect.

    I still miss the snappy Pal­mOS UI though since there’s quite some slug­gish­ness to go around typ­i­cal of Win­dows. How­ever, only a hand­ful of hangs/freezes/reboots on the other hand and at least I’m not trapped on the Titanic. Also, HTC is cur­rently very active in mak­ing great enhance­ments to the dull wince.

  41. 41BevHoward — January 1, 2008 at 12:55 pm

    » Record­ing the call «

    At the begin­ning of vir­tu­ally every call to any tech sup­port site, a recorded mes­sage is played for the caller which nor­mally states;

    “…this call may be recorded for qual­ity assur­ance purposes…”

    They have granted explicit per­mis­sion for any­one to record the call!

    Bev­erly Howard

  42. 42AB — January 1, 2008 at 3:33 pm

    I’ve been using Treo’s for the last cou­ple years, and palms for a decade. I had the 650 when it came out and then a 700p until just this week. As of two days ago we’ve switched to iPhones because 1) the tech sup­port is now a rev­enue gen­er­at­ing depart­ment for Palm & 2) Both Palm & Verizon’s cus­tomer sup­port has been com­pletely com­pro­mised by some seri­ously rude, demean­ing, and com­pletely use­less reps. I hon­estly can’t tell if cus­tomer sup­port has ever been good, but both com­pa­nies have basi­cally turned sup­port into a bat­tle. I dreaded hav­ing to call with a prob­lem, like my 700p’s micro­phone didn’t work. I used the ear­piece for a cou­ple days because I was too busy and couldn’t spend the time or energy to deal with Ver­i­zon and Palm. And when I finally did, after hours of call­ing one to be told to call the other, I too had the ‘option’ of spend­ing $400 to replace my new phone with a 90-day refurb. Sim­ply because I did not pur­chase the phone at an ‘off­i­cal’ Ver­i­zon store, or from Palm directly. Instead, I pur­chased it from a store with a huge Ver­i­zon ban­ner and the phone was brand new in a shrinkwrapped box, but sorry– They weren’t an ‘off­i­cal’ ver­i­zon store. Call­ing Palm was talk­ing to a brick wall. And the prick on the phone at Ver­i­zon actu­ally was like “What, you can’t afford $400?” and even said he/Verizon couldn’t care less if I can­celed because they get $175 per phone “to off­set the cost of deal­ing with cus­tomers like you”.

    I spoke to them a cou­ple days ago before switch­ing, about my con­tact, and found they’ve been charg­ing me $20 a month for a ser­vice I’ve told them to can­cel 3 TIMES. So hon­estly, it wouldn’t mat­ter if Palm came out with a ground break­ing device and verizon’s wire­less net­work was upgraded to giga­bit wire­less. They’ve lost our busi­ness and more impor­tantly the influ­ence on other people’s pur­chases. I was skep­ti­cal of the iPhone, but they actu­ally forced me into pur­chas­ing it. And now, after using it and see­ing it does meet my needs, I can’t see ever going back.

  43. 43DWM — January 1, 2008 at 4:26 pm

    AB what you should have done was sue Ver­i­zon in small claims court if you had any issues with them that cost you to be out of any money. Heck if you have been harmed mon­e­tar­ily go for it!! I did and received a lot of money to set­tle. My invest­ment about $50.00 it was well worth it. You can use this web­site to find their reg­is­tered agent…http://www.sunbiz.org/ which is the entity that’s actu­ally sued.

    All the stan­dard dis­claimers apply. I’m not an attor­ney, but I’m a con­sumer that knows my rights in the state I live in and how to wield them like a club when I need to. I’ve whacked a few of the big names around and I’m proud of it. Maybe I need to go to law school. :-)

    The prob­lem with American’s is we’ve let these cor­po­rate enti­ties take advan­tage of us for to long. A lot is all pro– them and not us, but if enough peo­ple would stop spend­ing money or boy­cott com­pa­nies maybe they would straighten up!! hahaha who am I kid­ding there are to many Sheep­eo­ple out there to mat­ter. http://www.sheepeople.org

    I’m not fond of AT&T either look back at 2006 and 2007 and see what they’ve been involved in. Things they’ve done, etc. browse thru http://www.arstechnica.com and see what I mean.

  44. 44kostia — January 2, 2008 at 1:14 am

    >Cur­rently the EVDO, phone as modem and all my Palm soft­ware is the only thing hold­ing me to this phone.

    Exactly! There are Palm OS pro­grams I *need* (granted, some of them are games, but I don’t apol­o­gize for that; enter­tain­ment is a real func­tion). And since I started work­ing full-time remotely, being able to use the phone as a high-speed Blue­tooth modem (“teth­er­ing”) gives me noth­ing less than free vaca­tion days to travel.

    As a Mac user, I want an iPhone or an iPod touch–badly–but I’m not ready to replace my Treo 700p with any­thing else.

  45. 45BenR — January 2, 2008 at 9:26 am

    I’ve just ditched my WM5 HTC Her­mes, truly a hor­ri­ble phone: slow, unre­li­able and fid­dly. Cur­rently using an SE P1i, nice form fac­tor but the UI is very slow and buggy.

    I’ll prob­a­bly join the iPhone hordes when my cur­rent con­tract runs out, in the mean­time I’ll prob­a­bly buy a Nokia 6120c

  46. 46Dave — January 2, 2008 at 3:39 pm

    Sounds like you and the tech sup­port team really struck wrong notes together. Based on the time of year, you both may have been pre­dis­posed to be fractious.

    That aside, I don’t believe sup­port agents should ever degrade their com­mu­ni­ca­tions to the level of inter­ac­tion you received. It’s unpro­fes­sional. I assume Palm will respond to you in a fair way and with due apologies.

    It sucks that they don’t seem to link their sales and sup­port record sys­tems together prop­erly. Might be a good idea…

    Per­son­ally, I rarely con­tact sup­port if I can help it. Online sources are best but I’ll only call if I’m forced to. I could tell you hor­ror sto­ries about my DSL provider’s ser­vice incom­pe­tence — great data speed but ludi­crous billing and tech support.

    Regard­ing the other com­ments about Palm qual­ity, you can’t get the func­tion­al­ity of a Treo on iPhone. I love the iPhone speed, OS and visual sen­si­bil­ity. I’m not crazy about iPhones form fac­tor or the annoy­ing way some of its func­tions work. You can’t get text into iPhone in an effi­cient way. So I feel happy to call the emperor’s new clothes on Iphone, iter­a­tion 1. Apple is not stu­pid — they know this stuff. They’ll either ignore the smart­phone mar­ket in favor of con­sumer high rev­enue yield phones or they’ll come after both fea­ture and smart­phones with a vengeance.

  47. 47Christoph — January 2, 2008 at 4:20 pm

    If you use a BB you will either need an exter­nal host­ing server for you emails (which, in Ger­many, you can buy for 20 € per month) or a BB Server Soft­ware installed in your office. The lat­ter never worked for me. My iphone, on the other hand con­nects to our Exchange Server via imap seamlessly.

  48. 48Adambomb13 — January 3, 2008 at 7:33 pm

    Can any­one show/tell me a phone like the Treo 700P that can do the ALL of fol­low­ing:
    1) Per­sonal Infor­ma­tion Man­ager (PIM) as good as Agen­dus Pro (its really awe­some I use it at work EVERYDAY)
    2) A per­sonal alarm clock 6 dif­fer­ent alarms like But­ler
    3) Take crappy video & pic­tures LOL but its still a fea­ture
    4) Run a GPS pro­gram like Tom­Tom 5
    5) Play avi videos of real movies (Kinoma 4.4)
    6) Record phone calls as good as (mVoice 5.5)
    7) Con­trol your PC’s at home like Palm VNC (which blows peo­ples minds)
    8) Be used as a modem with PdaNet (run­ning on EDVO speeds), it worked great play­ing WoW on my lap­top teth­ered to my Treo 700P
    9) MS Office com­pa­tia­bil­ity with using of Quick­Of­fice
    10) Able to watch my DirecTV using sling­player (Palm)
    11) Ok email pro­grams like Agendus/SnapperMail

    If you can tell me one phone that has all of the above flex­i­a­bil­ity I’m interested.

    Palm tech sup­port does stink, and if I had your expe­ri­ence I would drop them too, but for me there is NO phone that I’m aware of that does ALL 11 above points.

  49. 49» Palm Customer care - brutal edition -> TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog — April 21, 2008 at 11:11 am

    […] on over to tnl.com for the full scoop…hope this helps all those of you frus­trated with Palm’s Customer […]

  50. 50Allen — April 28, 2008 at 4:58 pm

    I don’t think I’m ready to aban­don Palm alto­gether just yet; I’ve been using var­i­ous devices for sev­eral years, and until recently, never had any major prob­lems. I’ve got­ten so used to the inter­face and the func­tions. I’ve mostly used my Palm devices for phone num­bers, cal­en­dars, to-do lists, games, and such, but only for per­sonal, not busi­ness, use. Not only that, I’m not ready to upgrade to a smart­phone, even though they’re so preva­lent these days.

    Any­way, here’s my Palm story:

    I bought a TX last July (actu­ally exchanged it at Sta­ples under the extended war­ranty I had pur­chased), so it was – and still is – under the Palm one-year war­ranty. In March, I started hav­ing prob­lems with the dig­i­tizer and the sty­lus not respond­ing; and finally it quit alto­gether, so the sty­lus did noth­ing, but all the but­tons worked. I called Palm CS and arranged to send the device in for repair. I wasn’t charged for the call since it was for a repair, and of course the war­ranty was still valid, so I only had to pay for ship­ping (thank good­ness the TX is light!).

    After being with­out the TX for more than two weeks, I finally got it back, and was so relieved when I turned it on and the sty­lus worked again! I knew they had only repaired the device and not sent a “recon­di­tioned” one, because the Palm logo above the screen at the top of the case on the one I had sent was slightly rubbed off, and the one I got back was the same.

    The device worked per­fectly for two days; then I was using it like nor­mal one day, turned it off, set it down, picked it back up a few min­utes later, pushed the power but­ton – and noth­ing. It wouldn’t turn on. None of the but­tons worked, no reset worked, noth­ing. The com­puter wouldn’t rec­og­nize it, so a Hot­Sync wasn’t pos­si­ble either (well, since it wouldn’t turn on, that wasn’t likely any­way). I know the hand­held had been fully charged before I had turned it off the last time, so that wasn’t the prob­lem. It was just dead.

    I called Palm AGAIN to arrange to send the TX back – AGAIN. This time the turn­around was much shorter, about a week, so that led me to believe that I had been sent a recon­di­tioned device this time (and the logo was intact). Every­thing worked fine on this most recent one for a week. In the mean­time, my main com­puter went down (I’m using my lap­top to get online), so I couldn’t Hot­Sync the TX (but all the data files are still intact on the hard drive). I man­u­ally typed in a few things on the hand­held just so I could still use it until I got my com­puter working.

    But a week after I got the sec­ond TX from Palm, I was hold­ing it in my hand, look­ing at the screen, read­ing some­thing, and it turned off. I thought it was the auto-shutoff set­ting, so I pushed the power but­ton – and NOTHING HAPPENED. AGAIN. This was the SECOND hand­held that had been “repaired” and sent back to me, only to die for no rea­son (it was almost fully charged). I began to sus­pect that they had “fixed” the one I had just sent, opened the cas­ing of the one they were get­ting ready to send back to me, and put the inner work­ings of the “fixed” one in, mak­ing me think it was a “recon­di­tioned” unit.

    That was Fri­day evening, so I fig­ured I wouldn’t be able to call them until today (Mon­day), which I did this after­noon. I got dis­con­nected twice before finally get­ting through to some­one; and after explain­ing the sit­u­a­tion to “Jesse” (funny how these tech­ni­cians in the Mid­dle East, where they out­source the jobs to, have such American-sounding names), I said I wanted to speak to a super­vi­sor: I felt that after 2 devices died, I was enti­tled to some kind of sat­is­fac­tion, pos­si­bly even an Advanced Exchange with­out hav­ing to pay for it (it’s nor­mally $40). After I had given “Jesse” the ser­ial num­ber, he claimed that the 90-day war­ranty on the device had expired because it had been pur­chased at Overstock.com!! But that was the 2nd hand­held that PALM had sent me. “Jesse” had read the wrong ser­ial num­ber; he real­ized his mis­take and rescinded that claim.

    (By the way: I’m pur­posely using the quotes when refer­ring to “Jesse” after read­ing some of the sto­ries on here, espe­cially the one about “Jose” and him not exist­ing. My wife said that they’re prob­a­bly made-up names anyway.)

    I did explain every­thing to him, and I asked more than once to speak to a super­vi­sor, or some­one that could help me. But “Jesse” said that he could not let me speak to a super­vi­sor until we found out what the prob­lem was and went through the trou­bleshoot­ing steps. I told him that I knew what the prob­lem was, and we couldn’t trou­bleshoot because THE THING WOULD NOT TURN ON!!

    My wife finally took the phone to speak to this guy. She’s a red­head of Irish descent: when she gets going, you do not want to get in her way. But “Jesse” was as obsti­nate with her as he was with me. In fact, he was rude to her and repeat­edly cut her off. (Her thoughts on that are that Mid­dle East­ern men don’t think of women as their equal, so he felt insulted that a woman was speak­ing to him the way she was. Well, too damn bad.)

    He told her to plug the TX into the AC adapter and reset it; we tried, it did noth­ing. He said to plug the TX into the Hot­Sync cable and plug that into the com­puter and try the reset again; and again, noth­ing. She asked him more than once to speak to a super­vi­sor, and he refused to do so with her also. He also said that before any­thing else could be done, he had to go through all the trou­bleshoot­ing steps to try and deter­mine the prob­lem, AND doc­u­ment every­thing, even if we had already done every­thing he told us to do (which I had, sev­eral times).

    Finally, after going back and forth with “Jesse” (sound famil­iar?), as well as me get­ting back on the phone and try­ing to talk to him, he relented and told my wife that he was going to trans­fer her to a “Tech 2”. He put her on hold for a few min­utes, and I took the phone; but then “Jesse” came back on the phone and said that HE had spo­ken to the “Tech 2”. But he didn’t trans­fer us to any­one else! Once my wife found that out, she took the phone again and asked him why he didn’t trans­fer us. He claimed that he had never told her he would do so. (Hm; some­one at Palm CS lying to a cus­tomer? Imag­ine that!)

    The last thing he would tell us, after con­tin­u­ing to refuse to trans­fer us to any­one else, was to leave the hand­held plugged into the USB port for two hours (“trickle charge” – been there, done that), try the reset every half hour, and CALL CUSTOMER SERVICE BACK! (Do I need to even tell you if leav­ing it plugged into the com­puter worked?) But he also said that when we called back, we would be trans­ferred directly to a super­vi­sor. My wife con­firmed this with him sev­eral times to make sure that she under­stood him, and that it would hap­pen that way. By this time it was clear that there was noth­ing else to dis­cuss, so my wife hung up and we waited. One small bright spot in all this that my wife told me about after she hung up: “Jesse” did tell her – if she under­stood cor­rectly – that once I called back and spoke to some­one, I would prob­a­bly be given the Advance Exchange at no charge. But of course that remains to be seen.

    In the mean­time, I did some search­ing and found this site, and read­ing the sto­ries here and other places started to worry me about call­ing back. But call back I did after 2 hours; and after get­ting dis­con­nected AGAIN, I finally reached “Gold­wyn” (you gotta be kid­ding me!). I briefly explained what “Jesse” had told me, includ­ing talk­ing to a super­vi­sor; so “Gold­wyn” put me on hold to “pull up my record” and see what it said. When he came back, he said that my case had to be for­warded to another call cen­ter, but that another “Tech 2” would look at my case and would call me back “in about an hour or in about a day”. Way to nar­row it down.

    Some­one finally did call back today, and as I sus­pected, an Advance Exchange with no cost to me (even return ship­ping) was autho­rized. I should get a new TX in “2 to 3 busi­ness days”, and it will include a pre-paid return box; so all I’ll have to do is send the dead one back. A bonus with that is that I’ll know they didn’t try to dupe me by just switch­ing outer cases.

    So, even though my expe­ri­ence with “Jesse” was pretty hor­ri­ble, it looks like things will work out to my advan­tage – pro­vided, of course, that they actu­ally send the unit when they say they will!

  51. 51Palm responds, Part 1 — July 29, 2008 at 9:38 am

    […] responds, Part 1 Jan­u­ary 12, 2008Readers of this blog have recently heard about my amus­ing expe­ri­ence with the tech sup­port at Palm, where I was told by an off­shore tech sup­port lady that she was the CEO of Palm. Before post­ing the […]

  52. 52Palm responds, Part 2 — July 29, 2008 at 9:39 am

    […] Cus­tomer Rela­tions World­wide at Palm Com­put­ing. This dis­cus­sion was held over email as a result of a recent issue I had with the Palm call cen­ter. Part 1 of the dis­cus­sion looked at Palm’s call cen­ters. In this sec­ond part, we look at the […]

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