What Happened To Palm?

Ian Lamont writes "Palm's fourth quarter results came out a few days ago, and they were not pretty: Palm reported losses of 40 cents per share, for a quarterly loss of $43.4 million. It's the fourth straight quarter of losses, and it's clear that the company is not faring well in the rapidly evolving smartphone market. The Treo line is lagging after seven years, and while the Centro has done well, it's not well enough to compete with the likes of the iPhone 3G and RIM's surging BlackBerry line. New competition is on the horizon, with developers and manufacturers working on the Google Android platform and the recent news that Symbian is being open-sourced. What happened to Palm? What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?"

Comments

My story...

[fyngyrz]

I bought my Palm T|X, direct from Palm, within 24 hours of when they first became available. I ordered it direct so that Palm would get all the margin (profit) from the order. I do this when I am trying to support a company. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this. They got more money from my orders than they would have if I had bought from, say, buy.com.

I ordered it overnight on Wednesday afternoon; they sat on the order until Friday, and so I received it Monday, basically five days after I had ordered it instead of one. Annoying, but it was new, they were probably overwhelmed with orders, etc., so I just grumbled a bit. The TX itself, well, it was fantastic. A little thing here or there wasn't perfect, but overall, this was the PDA I'd been waiting for. WiFi, Bluetooth, beautiful display, music and video playback, used almost all my software from my long in the tooth M505 Palm... the TX is fantastic. Really.

Considering that I was so happy with the T|X, I decided to get one for my sweetheart as well (she's also a long-time Palm/PDA user.) So, I ordered it on October 18th. We received it on October 19th. Much better. Unfortunately, this is where the happy tone of the story fades out.

Her TX would refuse to connect to any WiFi node without taking about ten tries. Then it would connect. Once connected, it was fine. But connecting could literally take five minutes of poking and prodding it. This was clearly no good (heck, PDAs are supposed to be convenient, aren't they?) So I called Palm. They kept me on the phone for about 40 minutes (I timed it. Total cost to me, $46.60 via AT&T) I spoke to Cody in support. In 40 minutes, he verified, apparently by following a support script, what I had clearly described to him in the first 30 seconds: This T|X was not connecting properly. Yes, I kept my temper and stayed polite. I know this game.

So he tells me, now I have to call the Palm store. So I do - toll free. I tell them what Cody told me, and I give them the service request number he supplied for my issue. They take it, tell me it will be 24-48 hours and then they will issue (by email) an RMA. This new fellow also explains that the procedure continues such that if they accept the RMA (verify the problem on receipt of the unit) then Palm will refund to my card.

I object: I ask, "Why refund? I want it replaced -- this is a gift!" They say there is no other option, and this is to "protect them from fraud." I ask them how, exactly, giving me my $300 back protects them more than giving me a working T|X... but this only angers the person on the phone, who tells me he isn't going to explain company policy to me. Imagine that. So I thank him for his time (no, really, I did, and I remain polite as well) and I hang up.

So, 48 hours pass, no RMA email. (Definitely -- I kept every email while waiting for the RMA, so no spam filtering, nothing. Man, was that annoying!) So I call them again. This guy tells me that it takes 2-5 days to issue an RMA and the previous person "didn't know what they were talking about." Uh-huh.

So I wait. Five days pass. No RMA. So I call them again. It's October 24th now. They say they'll send it out after 5 pm, specifically telling me these emails are batched all at once. 5pm rolls around... no RMA. 9pm... midnight...

So the next morning, I call them again, only this time I call technical support back at the toll number. (Total time, 20 minutes, Total cost to me, $23.30 via AT&T -- we're now at $69.00 expended on toll calls to Palm support.) We're still sitting on this busted T|X, and no RMA. I'm not happy at all. My sweetheart is dissapointed, to say the least. But I remained polite. The fellow on the phone (Chris, employee number 72485) allowed as to how he could escalate the issue, and fax me the RMA. He did, and we got it, wonder of wonders, and so now we have this RMA. It's a UPS ground return to Palm. Gritting my teeth, I hand it off to UPS and wait.

On November 3rd, I receive an email(!) from Palm saying that they

Re:Palm has been busy....

[goombah99]

Want to make a chat application? Have an ssh session running in the background? Have the wifi card work as a wireless router with an internet connection through the cellphone service? Nope, sorry. The hardware can do it, but it's not part of Steve Job's vision.

You clearly did not watch the Keynote. They ridiculed this idea for mobile computing. Backround apps are the death of your battery. Do you really want to be dicking with task managers on a mobile device to find out what's using up your resources? And then there's apps that want persistent connections. Apple finessed that by giving away push notification server available to all developers.

In the future your persistent connection (e.g the ssh connection) will be running on a server not on the iphone. The display might be on the iphone but the ssh session you are monitoring won't be on the iphone. You can stop and start this display app, just like it were a VNC connection or a unix "Screen" connection without affecting the ssh operation.

Yes they have chat too. Yes Jobs said they will allow wifi phone service.

You really ought to watch the keynote since you are quite mistaken in your information.