Palm’s Sneakwrap Warranty

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.”

It is also very unlikely one will find about the 90-day warranty by perusing on Palm’s website. “Nothing is said about the warranty on the main product page for the Tungsten E2 on the Palm website,” the reader wrote. Neither is it mentioned in any of the subcategory pages linked from there like ‘details,’ ‘gallery,’ or the glossy PDF product brochure. An obvious spot for it would be the ‘spec’ page, but no, it’s not there either. To actually discover which products have a 90-day warranty and which ones have a full year, you have to navigate through their support section to the ‘find your warranty’ link, then pick out the product name again from a list by country, which then finally takes you to the warranty matrix that actually shows the E2 has only 90 days from purchase date. It’s almost as if they are trying to hide the fact that it is so short.”

Indeed, if you follow in the reader’s footsteps on Palm’s website (which as I write this on Oct. 29th remains exactly as he described), it is obvious Palm is trying to hide its warranty. The logical places where Palm should tell a potential customer about the 90-day warranty are silent on the subject. Perhaps the most absurd example is the “compare” page which shows more than 40 comparative features for the E2 and two other Palm handhelds but fails to mention the fact that one (the Palm TX) has a one-year warranty while the E2 and the Palm Z22 have the 90-day warranty.

And any prospective Tungsten E2 customer who goes looking for the warranty on the Palm Legal Notices page will likely be misled. Clicking on the “Terms and Conditions of Purchase” leads to a page of legal terms above which is a “Warranty” link. But that Palm Limited Warranty says new hardware products are warranted for one year from date of purchase. So why doesn’t that apply to the Tungsten device? I was puzzled by that, but the reader had already spotted what was going on. Deep in those “Terms & Conditions” below the link to the warranty are the following weasel words:

“The standard limited warranty applicable to each of the products you purchase under this agreement is described on the site. The actual limited warranty statement that applies is included in the documentation packaged with the product. Palm disclaims all other warranties, express or implied…”

So apparently the warranty document linked on that same page doesn’t really count. Instead, the customer has to guess that the real warranty information is hidden many clicks away in the support section of Palm’s website. Or you can find it inside, after you’ve been tricked into buying the product.

There is one little piece of good news – the reader was able to fix his mother’s Tungsten E2 after purchasing a replacement digitizer on the web for $45. But he won’t be buying any more Palm products as gifts for anyone. “How low has Palm quality dropped such that they can only provide a 90-day warranty on a $200 retail piece of electronics?” he write. “How come there is no warranty printed externally on the box, or on the main product webpage, or anywhere else you’re likely to look? More than anything, I hope bringing this out might convince Palm that their new gear deserves a full year warranty, and perhaps it might also convince them to get off of this EULA-like path they have started to tread.”

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