Palm M100 series class action suit

I know the occasional person who doesn't know me reads this blog. This public service message is for you, uh, if you have an M-series Palm PDA (such as the M105).

I bought one for Alana for Christmas of 2001 or 2002. It worked fine for a while, but shortly after the warranty expired the Palm started dying when you changed the batteries. No matter how quickly you changed them, all the data was lost. This was annoying, requiring you to reinstall after every battery change. (It also meant you couldn't change batteries while away from a computer where you could sync the thing.)

We figured it was "just one of those things". For her birthday this year I got her a new Palm Zire 22. It gave her what the M105 had, but with more memory and colour. We planned to put the old M105 on eBay for parts. Before I did that, though, I thought I'd try one last time to find a fix for the battery change problem. I have an even older Palm IIIxe (bought the original one in 2000; replaced it with this one two years ago, bought for $30 on eBay). If I could fix the M105 it would be a step up.

While searching, I found mention of a class action suit. I then found this link to the law firm handling the suit: http://www.taylorsettlement.com/

It's a pretty spartan little web site, but it had some pretty legitimate looking documents.

Apparently the battery capacitors (electronic devices that store an electrical charge even when the device is turned off or without power) were faulty. Palm refused to acknowledge the problem or replace the devices. Someone sued them. Palm settled, though they still don't admit fault.

I sent in a claim in Alana's name. Yesterday the mailer showed up from Palm asking us to send in the device. I mailed it away today. They will either refurbish the device or replace it with a device of equal or greater value. I'm hoping for the latter, of course. I'll let everyone know what happens. If I get something out of this, it would be the first time I received more than a discount coupon from a class action suit!

The claim has to be filed by July 16, so if you have a faulty Palm M100 series you will want to file your claim right away.