Gadget report (III) — Treo 600, luckily no flip cover to break

The Treo, of course, is Palm One’s little PDA phone. The latest version, the 600, is smaller and cuter than previous versions.

We won’t be buying any Treo’s though. Sakiko bought the very first one when it came out two years ago, the model with a flip cover (the second version, the 270, had this flip lid, too). It wasn’t a bad device, although a bit bulky. Unfortunately, one side of where the flip cover was connected broke about two months ago. But the brain-damaged design is that you have to unflip the cover in order to have a phone call. There’s a little wire going through the plastic connection that broke, so it’s still connected, like someone’s hand where the wrist bone got cut off but is still hanging on by the tendons. The phone is essentially now unusable.

What idiot designed a product with inferior materials at such an obvious point of failure? There’s no way to fix it, except to pay Palm hundreds of dollars, more than it would cost to buy a new phone. I find it absolutely irresponsible that Palm would not cover the cost of fixing a problem like this which was so obviously a result of its own design mistakes.

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