Palm in a tailspin?

[maimengzhu]

I've been a very happy user of Pleco for quite a few years now, and have always run it on a Palm device. I've been through a number of Palms in that time. Some got lost, some got lifted, my last one just plain wore out. (that is a testament to how useful Pleco is!)

I bought a new one last December. After about 2 months the digitizer got whacked out. Unfortunately, I had recommended the Palm to a number of friends whom I have addicted to Pleco. They also had trouble.
I sent the unit in for repair. It came back working, but after about 3 months this time, it started up with the same shenanigans.

I called Palm last week, and found much to my surprise that I would be on the hook for the repair as they now have a THREE MONTH WARRANTY?!? When I bought it in December of 07, I was told there was a one year warranty. Eventually, I was able to get a manager on the phone, who finally agreed to fix it for me AGAIN, and he would waive the fee.

I'm beginning to feel quite nervous about recommending the Palm platform to anyone at this time. Quality of the device has fallen, the support all comes from India, and now (even on a new unit) it only has a 90 day warranty. All these, in my mind, point to some real issues with the company. I'd like to know what kind of experience others have had with the Palm PDA in the past year. I end up recommending Pleco to many colleagues and students. And while I am more than confident in the quality and support behind our favorite 電子字典, I have huge reservations about Palm.

 

[ipsi]

Seems Mike would agree: http://www.pleco.com/whichpda.html

It's probably been updated since you last looked...

Palm is seriously struggling. I like the form-factor of their phones, but they're not coming out with anything new or cool at the moment, and their new OS... Well, no one has heard anything about it, and it's due to be released in maybe 6 months. Not a good look for them right now.

 

[maimengzhu]

My sense is that not only are they losing market share, their quality has also followed suit. Looks like I will have to upgrade in the very new future. I don't expect them to fix my Palm for long.

 

[radioman]

I have not seen that blurb before in it's current form. As for me, I have retreated back to version 1 on my palm E2 due to b5 stability challenges, and will pick up an HP or other when back in the U.S. in a few weeks. I do not want a phone combo, and the pocket PCs appear very expensive here. Maybe I just do not know the market on how to find cheap and or used models...

 

[mikelove]

The software picture for Palm is indeed pretty bleak; Access Linux Platform is basically dead as a smartphone OS, and Palm's own Linux-based system supposedly doesn't even run yet; we haven't heard a word about it from them yet, and anyway after the Foleo fiasco Palm's going to have a tough time convincing developers to support another new platform of theirs until it's actually out in a widely-available, shipping device, which means even if they get Nova out in '09 you wouldn't see it get much attention from developers until 2010, at which point we'll all be too busy cashing enormous checks from Apple to care about what Palm's doing.

If I were running Palm now I'd probably be looking to transition the product line entirely over to Windows Mobile and then hope to get bought by HTC or one of the big mainland electronics firms - the Palm brand name still has a lot of value, and the Treo line still has some really nice features (the 680's keyboard is the best I've ever used on a handheld) which someone might like to incorporate into some other products.

The hardware quality was what really pushed me over the line on Palm, though - we can't in good conscience continue advising people to buy hardware with such high failure rates, even if a defective Palm isn't our fault we're still the reason that someone bought it and as often as not they're still writing us to ask for help with fixing it. (and honestly, a 3 month warranty? I've seen money-back guarantees longer than that - heck, if you get the thing as a Christmas present you might only have a few weeks of actually using it before the warranty runs out) The phones actually seem to be a lot better on the quality front, but in our experience phone buyers tend to pay less attention to our recommendations than handheld buyers do.

radioman - daniel123 reported having good luck finding cheap / warrantied Dell Axim x51v devices on eBay, so that might be one place to look; they seem pretty solidly built (very few complaints about them anyway) and characters do look absolutely gorgeous on a VGA screen.

 

[ipsi]

Have a look the 'Careers' section of the Palm website. That's also a little concerning, mostly in the form of more technical jobs being advertised for than I would have thought. Could be one of the reasons we haven't heard anything about the next Palm OS?

 

[hippo]

re: Digitizer problems

I found that my high-res screen quickly fall out of alignment (much, much more quickly than the old low-res screens). Maybe using only 3 reference points is not enough. In addtion, sometime the mis-alignment is not linear -- it's not always the same "offset" in different parts of the screen. I found that a program called PowerDiGi by Palmpowerups solved my digitizer/screen alignment problem. It offers up to 70 reference points to align the digitizer. It's made a huge differnce in my screen (I was thinking of sending my TX back to Palm, but PowerDiGi solved my digitizer problems).

The TX is my fourth Palm in 10 years. Unfortunately, Palm doesn't seem to be supporting the platform and I figure the TX will be my last Palm. I seem to get 2-3 years out of each Palm, so maybe Palm will get their act together and do something in time for my next replacement PDA.

 

[jinteh]

I wonder about Palm's quality too. The M500 I bought back in 2001 is still running great, minus the black/white screen and 33mhz processor. Its strange about your warranty being only 3 months. I bought my TX new in December 07 also (when they had the $199 sale, otherwise I would have gotten the HP Ipaq). Due to digitizer problems it was replaced the first month with a new unit and repaired the 2nd time. The overseas support guy (India?) confirmed I have a one year warranty. Is it possible you might have gotten a refurbished unit?

|JoHn|

 

[Henry]

Thanks for the PowerDiGi suggestion, hippo, my T|X is much more usable now!

I'm slowly getting used to the idea of having a Windows Mobile for my next Pleco display device... very disapointing!

Henry

 

[tianjinpete]

From an article in today's NY Times on Jon Rubinstein's role in reviving the Palm brand at
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/techn ... 0palm.html

“In recent years Palm lost its way. Its share of the smartphone market has been halved to about 16.9 percent over the last two years. First, Research in Motion found the sweet spot of business users with its BlackBerry. More recently, Apple grabbed consumers’ fancy with the iPhone.

Palm has tried to innovate beyond the five-year-old Treo with little effect. It announced with great fanfare last year that it would build the Foleo, a cross between a smartphone and notebook computer, only to cancel the project three months later. While cellphone makers like Samsung, LG and R.I.M. brought out products to compete with the iPhone, Palm has told Treo loyalists and investors to be patient. They will need to be. Palm’s stock price is down 90 percent since its high in March 2000.
...
Palm sold two million Centros in eight months, garnering the company revenue and time. “The brand is not dead,” Mr. Keast said. “It is just sleeping.”

Still, rumors about the company’s demise persist. But the Centro’s success signaled that the company was changing, whatever the outcome next year. Richard Wong, a venture capitalist at Accel Partners in Palo Alto, said, “Just when you count them out, they do something interesting.””

 

[radioman]

Just purchased the Axim x51v on ebay - also expanded battery, all new. I will be picking this up in the US on the 29th. In preparation,

- Are there any add-ons I need (Chinese language) to allow other applications than Pleco to utilize Chinese character sets? I see comments about CE-Star - not sure what would be best for the x51v.

Comments appreciated.

 

[mikelove]

tianjinpete - thanks for the link. I'd love to think they could pull it off, but they've screwed up so many promising new ideas in the past that I'm not holding my breath - if the new OS is an absolute slam-dunk that might persuade us to keep updating the Palm version for a little longer at least, but the stuff we're considering for 3.0 would be completely impossible to implement with the old Palm APIs, so the only way that's likely to get on Palm would be if we ported it over to that new OS with its new and hopefully less-terrible programming interface. (which wouldn't help people with older Palms) The Treo Pro looks cool, though, and since that runs Windows Mobile it should work perfectly fine with Pleco 2.0 and 3.0.

radioman - CE-Star's what you'd want, I think, though since the X51v runs Windows Mobile 5 instead of 6 you might be able to use one of the other, not-updated-as-recently solutions like Monster Chinese.

 

[ipsi]

I'm seriously considering a Treo Pro, provided I can find somewhere to import it from (Like it's going to be sold in NZ... ). Not so keen on the GPS though - sounds like it might be Data-only and thus provider dependent, which wouldn't be much use for me. The Touch Pro has also been getting a good review or two - sounds like TouchFlo 3D is much improved on that device, so again something for consideration.