Tuesday, November 18, 2003

I bought a PalmPilot Professional in 1997 from Fry's. It was the top of the line of the second-generation of what are now Palm PDAs. It served me well for many years but was starting to show its age.

So I went and bought myself a shiny new Palm Zire 21, from Fry's again. I transfered the data I wanted to keep and went on my merry way. Well, until I got to work the next morning and found that the Zire had hard-reset itself (Palm speak for clearing out all data, applications, settings, etc.) Gah?! Thankfully I'd hotsync'd my data to my PowerBook.

I'll save you the details, but this repeated itself several times over the next week. I emailed Palm Support but they weren't terribly helpful, so I returned the Zire to Fry's and got a new one, figuring I got a bad device. Nope, the resets still happened with the new one. Ok, so it's got to be something with me. A little detective work and I discovered that if my cell phone was in close proximity to my Zire and rang, the Zire reset itself. Some testing with other cell phones confirmed that it wasn't just my phone. So I fired off an email to Palm Support. They confirmed that they could replicate the behavior and informed me that the "Palm research team" was looking into the issue. This seemed like good news, so I waited for a reply. After no word for a week I pinged them. "Nope, still working on it" they replied. Two more weeks, again no word, so I pinged them again. Now I guess I've angered the gods:

"Currently, our engineers at palmOne, Inc. are working towards this issue for a resolution. However, we are unable to comment on the exact date of the release of the patch to resolve for this issue. Therefore, I request you visit the Palm Site occassionally as the updates on this issue will be posted on the Palm Site."

Maybe that's the best I can expect from technical support these days, but it seems somewhat lacking. In the meantime I'm very careful not to put my phone in my bag with my Zire.