Palm m100s - A Pattern of Defects?

An Anonymous Coward writes about his experience with a brand-new Palm: "Having a few years experience watching co-workers scratching out Grafitti on their little palm-sized toys and being reminded of appointments by musical ring-tones, I decided to take the plunge. More of a dip into a wading pool, as I chose the Palm m105. It was inexpensive enough ($149), and the 8 MB of memory seemed a more prudent choice over the tiny 1 MB in the $99 m100. My experiences quickly turned from elation to dread, however." This is the story of a piece of hardware's inexplicable degradation within 14 days. I thought we were making hardware better than this, but over the past few years, this is becoming more the rule than the exception. Is hardware issue limited to Palm, a case of bad manufacturing of a specific product, or a sign of things to come?

"I took it home and started playing with it. The Windows Palm desktop software installed and worked fine, the HotSync cradle did what it was supposed to do, and I happily started filling up the address and date books using the stylus. Only a few hours after I started using it, the display started acting up. The lower-left corner of the touch-screen started becoming insensitive and inaccurate. Not only were the neatest attempts at Graffiti input reduced to unrecognizable scrawls (using the Graffiti tutorial to trace out what the unit thought I was writing on the screen), but buttons on the screen above the input area were being activated (despite my going nowhere near them with the stylus). Repeated attempts at recalibrating the digitizer, as well as both a soft and hard reset, failed to fix the problem.

A quick search of Google Groups yielded several threads about this issue from others experiencing the exact problem. These experiences were also confirmed by negative reviewers at CNet. Some of them went back and forth with either Palm or the retailer with multiple replacement units, none completely working and defect-free.

Having had my m105 for less than 14 days, I promptly took it back to Office Depot for another one, which they were cheerfully willing to do. The second one worked just fine except that the top power button was inoperative! I was almost willing to live with this (as I could turn it on via other buttons, and have it automatically turn off), but the power button also controls the backlight and the hard reset. Based on my experiences with two defective units, and the bad experiences others have had going through both replacement and repair with Palm, I'm wasn't sure that I wanted to try a third. I took it back for a refund (also cheerfully done, and with apologies).

Obviously my experiences are not unique or even rare. Furthermore, repeated attempts to fix the problem via replacement or repair are not successful. Is this just a poorly-engineered and manufactured product to meet a price-point? Have there been quality control problems at their new assembly plant in Mexico (Previously all Palms were made in the United States)? Should I just forget about trying to get a low-priced starter Palm for the time being?"

Comments

Re:Cheap means cheap

[LinuxInDallas]

Regardless of the cost of the device I would hope that if you buy a Palm device it should be reliable. Sure, it may not have the features of it's bigger brothers but starting to fail on the same day you buy it is just not acceptable. If there are this number of devices that are failing so quickly you can be assured that Palm most likely knew about it during the development and protoyping phase. They must have decided that putting out a piece of crap is fine as long as they can still make a buck off it. Let's face it,a lot of us are still choosing Palm based on their name and past success. Time to look at someone else.

I've got quite a bit of experience with this

[FallLine]

Having deployed a couple hundred Palm M100 and M105s at work, I can say with certainty that the M100, and to a much lesser extent, the M105 have a problem with defective manufacture (something around 5% it seems) but are also of generally poorer construction than all other Palms. I dislike this, but I feel it is unfair to compare this series of Palm to other manufacturers because they're first generation devices and they're one of the few modern PDAs that are designed to enter the sub-100 dollar price range. All other Palms in my experience (from the IIIs, to the V series, and so on) are exceptionally reliable when you consider the amount of abuse they withstand. It's really an apples and oranges comparison. If you're willing to spend the same amount of money on a Palm as you are on the other handhelds, you can get as good, if not greater, quality.

We get what we pay for

[JanneM]

Everybody want to get the best possible deal whenever we buy something. This goes not only for electronics, but for all big-ticket items: homes, cars - you name it. When it comes to most stuff, we have at least a vague idea that quality costs, and is worth having. We don't usually get the car with the lowest sticker price; we get the one with the best balance between perceived mechanical reliabilty, guarantees and price - features being equal.

But with electronics - specifically computers and related devices - we tend to act differently. We have an idea that all machines are about equal in qwuality; they tend to use the same components from the same factories, after all. Instead we have a sheet of performance figures (this much memory, that many MHz and so on), and try to find the seller with the lowest price for what we want to have.

What we forget is of course that quality still matters. There are a lot of ways to make a functionally identical item more or less reliable and long-lasting. But by focusing on price and ignoring quality issues for so long we have been digging our own graves. If a manufacturer is to compete (and not just become a niche operator or go extinct), he needs to cut corners wherever he can. You get circuit boards manufactured by the cheapest possible technology, soldered together by the lowest bidding contractor that still barely meet very minimal standards, and pack it together with iffy, electrically noisy power supplies and/or the cheapest rechargeable batterypacks money can (or can't ) buy. Then you install it into a case that's made to be cheap and easy to assemble, but that's barely adequate to hold the package together - and totally inadequate to protect the package from the wear and tear that will be the norm for the unit. The thing works when brought out of it's box, but that's about it.

Consider this: Let's say Palm had two models. they are identical, functionally - feature by feature, they are twins. One, however, is built to last, with a thicker glass substrate, a sturdier case, better solderings, sturdy metal contacts, 'real' key switches and so on. It's still not 'ruggedized' by any means, just a lot better at handling the daily grind. It also costs another $50 or so over the other unit. Which one will be the big seller, and which one will mostly collect dust in the showroom?

/Janne

Re:Cheap means cheap

[kko]

handspring != one drop wonder
I've had my trusty visor standard (lowest of the low end visors) for about a year and two months now, and being the careless slob that I am, I have dropped it countless times, on pavement, granite floors, wooden floors, etc... I even threw it on my bed once and it bounced right off and landed on my bedroom floor... but the little beast is still alive and kicking...
I've always had the provision of keeping the little screen protector that came with it hooked up, 'cause I never know where the little visor might end up next....
But so far, no cracks, only a couple of scratches on the back.
So cheap doesn't necessarily mean "cheap"....

Re:Cheap means cheap

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Yeah, and if people just starting to use your product line have a VERY bad experience, what are the chances they'll be interested in buying the more expensive stuff you want to sell?

His "dip into a wading pool" resulted in a shark attack.

I don't think he's going to go that route again.

Either he'll go to a competitor, or just forget about PDAs entirely.

Re:Cheap means cheap

[Zeinfeld]

The whole point of the M100 and M105 line is that they are ultra-cheap so that people who would not normally buy one will get into the market. Remember the Ford Pinto? It would have cost less than $30/car to fix the defect that made them blow up in rear end collissions but they wanted the car to sell for less than $2k/unit.

Casio appears to have worked out how to make pocket calculators that are both cheap and reliable. If Palm can't work out how to make its products more reliable they have big problems. This is not the only quality problem I have heard reported.

The real problem is that palm has done very little of significance since the Palm VII came out almost three years ago. All the interesting stuff on PalmOS has come from Sony, Handspring and the cellular companies. Some day the dragonball processor Palms will be on the store shelves, however this is likely to be too little too late.

Palm appear to have an Apple complex. They believe they know what customers want better than their customers. Problem there is that such companies have a habit of getting overly ideological about irrelevances.

I recently acquired a Zaurus 5000, even though the device is first generation it has a much more useful feature set than the Palm. There are plenty of things wrong with it (memory management is hopeless, a 32Mb machine should be able to run a Web browser without any difficulty, the machines we used to design the Web all had less memory.), however the rate of progress has been pretty good. They fixed the problem with the image viewer that meant that it could now view pictures from 2 Megapixel cameras pretty quick.

I suspect that the Zaurus and PocketPC lines will both develop quickly because they are in direct competition.