Palm's Sneakwrap Warranty

P>With software products, we all know that somewhere deep in the fine print the vendor probably disavows any real warranty. But it's a little more unexpected that a hardware vendor like Palm would hide -- in the most obscure corners of its website -- the fact that their warranty period on some products is so short as to be virtually useless.

"Last Christmas my siblings and I pooled together $200 to buy

With software products, we all know that somewhere deep in the fine print the vendor probably disavows any real warranty. But it's a little more unexpected that a hardware vendor like Palm would hide -- in the most obscure corners of its website -- the fact that their warranty period on some products is so short as to be virtually useless.

"Last Christmas my siblings and I pooled together $200 to buy my mother a Palm Tungsten E2 PDA," a reader recently wrote. "It seemed to work fine initially, but then my mother started mentioning that the PDA was not registering her stylus where she poked. Because we don't live nearby, I tried guiding her through digitizer calibration on the phone several times and finally chalked it up to poor hand/eye coordination in my aging mother. She struggled along with it for months, but it finally got so severe that the machine was basically unusable, and that's the point that I got to see it in person last month. Indeed, I found out that I had been totally wrong, there was nothing wrong with her hand/eye coordination, the digitizer has simply gone bad. We did a hard reset to erase all data and start off fresh, and the problem continued. It was a true hardware problem, and as I did some web research on it, I realized it was pretty common. I told her not to worry because we'd get it fixed under warranty."

The reader was assuming that the Palm PDA would have at least a one-year warranty, but instead he discovered the warranty is only for 90 days. "Yes, 90 short days on a stinking $200 piece of electronics," says the reader. "Almost any piece of electronic gear I know offers a one-year warranty, including the $30 made-in-China electronics seen in Walmart and everywhere else nowadays. So who would ever expect that a $200+ retail PDA from Palm would be covered by an absurdly short warranty? I wrote Palm Tech Support asking them to confirm this, and they responded that, yes, 'this device model carries a 90-day hardware warranty.' Not only that, but if I wanted to talk with a hum anabout it I could call a number that would cost $25 per incident as the device was out of the 90-day warranty period."

The reader says he and his siblings would not have chosen the Tungsten E2 if they'd known about the short warranty period, but how easy would it have been for them to discover this before they bought it? Not very. "We purchased it at the store, and it certainly is not printed anywhere externally on the Tungsten E2 box, which I have sitting right in front of me," wrote the reader. "There is a EULA-like sheet in the box itself that says it's just 90 days, but we couldn't see that when made the purchase. And since we gave it as a gift, I wasn't there to see it when it was opened."