PalmOne: A Diatribe

[Riptide]

In my 20 years of PC experience I have never worked with such an obstinate group of fools. Here is my tale of absolutely horrible customer service.

One of our end users bought a Tungsten E and used it for several months without issue. Calendar, date book, e-mail, etc. would synchronize just fine. When she attempted to load Adobe Reader for Palm OS things went to hell.

Support call to helpdesk placed, enter the tech (me).

It seems that when she loaded the Adobe program the Palm would seemingly freeze up during the hotsynch process @ the "Installing Handheld Applications" screen. An error would eventually come up indicating a loss of communication with the PC. This happened only when she tried to push the Adobe reader program. Date book, etc. still worked OK.

I tried the following to troubleshoot:
1) Removed/reinstalled both Palm Desktop and the Adobe reader software.
2) Downloaded/installed latest versions of both programs.
3) Hard reset the Palm and created a new user under Palm Desktop ("test").

#1,2,3 did not help at all. Same issue.

4) Took the Palm and tried synchronizing on a different PC. Same symptoms - it would fail when trying to install the handheld applications.
5) Took her Tungsten E and put it on a different laptop that already had a Tungsten E working just fine. Loaded Adobe - it pushed out the application just fine to the other guy's Palm (same Palm as hers) but failed in the same way when I tried hers. It wasn't the cable either, this guy's cable was known good.
6) Took her Palm and tried the same process on yet another computer (my work laptop) and had the exact same symptoms.
7) Loaded a different handheld application, in case the Adobe didn't like her particular palm for some reason. Same exact issue comes up.

At this point anyone who has a clue about PC troubleshooting knows - we have a bad Palm here.

Enter the effin' MORONS at PalmOne support. They insisted on me doing practically every single thing I had already done again. I was nice about it and played along. Here's where it got retarded. Even after pointing out #4,#5,#6, and #7 above they still insisted there was a software problem. They wanted me to speak to a second level tech. My patience was starting to wear but I was still pretty nice about it. They made an appointment to have a "2nd level tech" call me the next day at a set time. I arrived at her office, never got a call. I called them 30 minutes later and was told they would be calling me back in another half hour. Guess what? No call YET AGAIN. I called back and insisted on speaking to someone now. They kept me on hold but still couldn't get a 2nd level tech. They promised me that this tech would be calling me back later that day at yet another set time. No call again this time either. At this point I'm getting, quite frankly, warm. No make that hot. I called back and demanded to speak with someone again and after keeping me on hold they still couldn't get someone and decided to just give us an RMA and have it repaired. Finally we were getting somewhere.

Two weeks later we get the Palm back. Only there's (surprise) a problem. It's the same Palm and with the exact same problem! They had it marked as "good" like it passed their testing equipment but it still wouldn't take handheld applications. Just to be safe I took the other Tungsten E that another guy had in the office and tried to do the same thing - it pushed handheld apps to it just fine. So it clearly was NOT the computer and the Palm was still broken despite whatever their testing equipment had to say about it.

Called PalmOne (is that one brain cell?) support again. Basically had to repeat the entire process we had done previously again. This took quite some time out of my day and the end user's. Finally, the support person wanted me to talk to a second level technician again. She had the gall to try and tell me that it was still a software issue and just because another Tungsten E worked OK on that computer that it wasn't the source of our problems. Yeah right... whatever. I explain to her that previously they never called us back on several occasions when they had agreed to. She insisted we wait until speaking to this 2nd level tech before we do anything else and she promised they would call me back when they said. Two hours pass by and no phone call (surprise surprise).

At this point I'm ready to throw the Palm out the window, come through the phone, rip off their head, and crap down their damn worthless necks. So one of the VPs at our bank calls them up for me and explains that they will either replace the Palm, credit us back, or we will not ever buy another one for the organization again. There will be no more troubleshooting. Finally, we're getting results and will be getting a refund.

But look at all the crap both I and the end user had to go through when clearly we should not have had to deal with half of that.

PalmOne: what poor service. You guys shouldn't even call yourself a service department. How about "PITA" department? That would be more fitting.

BTW, . For God's sakes, do not buy anyone you know a Palm device for x-mas. Do it for me. Please.

[saturnotaku]

You couldn't pay me to own a Palm product. PocketPC 2003 all the way!

[oldsk00l]

That blows, I like their products....when they work. I'll make sure to switch to a pocketPC, more features anyway.

[Tuork]

Tell that to my mom.... she's been freaking obnoxious about buying a pda for about a month now.... ugh.
She finally ordered the thing.. a Palm Zire 72.

I actually think it's pretty cool. A friend also has one of those...

[r2d2d3d4d5]

My girlfriend has one. You can get a ton of games for them and lots of learning material. She thinks it's great. Not had to deal with Palm support though. Saying that I've had a bad time calling Dell a couple of times so I'm sure Palm are not the only bad ones out there.

[Riptide]

Dell is OK if you get the gold service/support. Talked to them a million times @ work and had -0- problems. The regular service OTOH might be a different story, though the one time I had to call them for a problem with a 2000FP monitor (no gold service on it) we didn't have a bad experience.

[GlowStick]

Hm, sounds like a regualr business pratice alot of companys.

However i would never buy a palm because I feel they are the apple of PDAs. They have high prices of ****ty underpowerd hardware.

If you compare features/abilitys to a dell pocket pc they cost more, yet do so much less. They can get away with crap support/rma because they dont have much competition. But with the PocketPC market, Dell,HP,Asus etc etc are all fighting eachother for customers.

[oldsk00l]

Well they are HORRIBLY overpriced...and the quality isn't much better..if at all

Look at what you get for $400 with a T5, and then look at the Axim X50, and it blows the T5 out of the water in features, speed, and screen clarity. Not to mention the case is sturdier...and the WiFi

It rules out the T5 altogether, when there is such good competition.