Got a new Palm!

Back in June I wrote about a class action suit against PalmOne, the company that makes the Palm PDA (personal digital assistant), and how they lost the suit and had to replace the M100 series of PDAs because of bad battery capacitors. The story is here:

http://hyperbear.blogspot.com/2006/06/
palm-m100-series-class-action-suit.html

Well, the Palm arrived a week ago Thursday! About six weeks earlier, the president of my company phoned PalmOne to find out what was causing the delay in receiving his replacement. Even though they said you had to wait eight to 12 weeks, and it wasn't past the 12 weeks, he phoned them anyway. About a week or two later he received his Palm. It was a refurbshed M105, the same model he sent in.

A week ago Thursday, we received the replacement. Inside the package was a band new Palm Zire 22, in its blister pack!

I don't know why we received a new device when my boss' boss received a refurbished model. Maybe his was a slightly newer M105 model and could be fixed as opposed to completely replaced. Or, maybe it's because he sent his application in a week before us. Or, just maybe it's because he complained to them, and so someone rushed a replacement out to him to get him off their back.

So, I now have the same model Palm as Alana. I bought her a new Zire 22 for her birthday this year. It's had some problems. It shuts down when it runs low on batteries and is flakey turning back on. We do have the receipt, though, so we're going to send it in to have it fixed.

The Zire 22 is a big upgrade from my old IIIxe. It has a colour screen (slightly smaller than the old Palm's), and instead of 8MB of memory it has 32MB, though only 24MB is available for use. It also has the latest version of the Palm operating system (OS). This was a mixed blessing. I used X-Master, a free versioin of HackMaster, to add "hacks" to the Palm. X-Master and hacks no longer work in version 5 of the OS. Fortunately one of the hacks I liked was built into the system, and another has been replaced by a program. The OS does come with some new applications, including a neat little notepad and a cool puzzle game.

The Zire 22 is also a little bit smaller than the old Palm, so it's easier to carry around. I'm happy! My boss' boss, however, is not...