Disappointment

This has not been a good day on the electronic devices front. Palm seems to have misplaced the PDA I sent them to repair, and the cell phone I wanted to buy seems to have undergone a last-minute change rendering it unsuitable for us in the good ol' US of A.

My Palm TX has been suffering from greatly reduced battery life for a few weeks now, so I sent it in for repairs. Two days ago, they sent me an email saying that it had shipped:

SRO# - S1-XXXXXXXXX
ORDER TYPE - REPAIR
PART# - 180-10098-00 - Palm TX, Multilingual


Dear XXXX XXXX

Your recent repair order with Palm has been completed. The repaired device has been shipped to you at the following address:

XXXX XXXX
XXXX XXXXXXX XXX
RICHLAND WA 99352


You should be receiving the device within the next three business days via DHL. To check current shipment status, click on the link below.

http://track.dhl-usa.com/atrknav.asp?ShipmentNumber=XXXXXXXXXXX

IMPORTANT:
Package tracking numbers are pre-assigned at our distribution center. After you receive this email, it may take up to the end of the next business day for tracking information to become active in DHL's system. If the link above contains no information, check it again in 24 hours.

Note that it should have been picked up no later than the end of the next business day, i.e., yesterday.

This morning I checked the tracking site at DHL and found no information,
again, so I called them and asked why. The answer was that the package hadn't been turned over to them yet! This did not please me, so I sent an email to Palm. The response was that it had shipped and that I should check DHL's website.

Right. That's what I'd been doing, as I had made clear in my first email. The second email bordered on the uncivil, basically asking, exactly where was my device since neither they nor DHL seemed to have it. Amazingly enough, now that I'm home, DHL shows it was picked up about an hour after my second email, a full day later than promised.

Probably not coincidently, Celestica, the company doing the repair has a location just across the Rio Grand from Pharr, TX, where DHL says the device was to be shipped. Outsourced customer service strikes again. When will companies learn that success means underpromising and overdelivering, not the other way around.

Now, on the HTC MTeoR front: I was on the phone with a vendor this morning when her tech-support folks overheard she was talking with me about the MTeoR. A key selling point with this phone has been that it's a true worldphone with full coverage on all GSM 3G systems both here and abroad. It now seems this isn't quite the case. Being a tri-band GSM/EDGE phone and a 2100 MHz UMTS phone is a deal-breaker for me since Cingular uses both the missing 850 MHz GSM band and the missing 1900 MHz UMTS band. It's a shame, really, because the MTeoR, as described in HTC's literature would have met my needs very, very nicely.

On the plus side of that whole experience though, was a very nice email exchange about Qualcomm chipsets in HTC phones with Dovid at On the Go Solutions. Dovid starts his emails with B"H. I was curious, so I googled it. The Wikipedia entry the popped up says that it means, Baruch hashem (Hebrew "Blessed is God"). I share the sentiment. As I told, Dovid, I didn't get much Hebrew in my Lutheran catechism class.

BTW, if the quality of their sales and tech-support staff is any indication, this is a company worth dealing with, even if their prices are higher than most other vendors.