The touch -screen alignment of the first Palm V I received went out of whack almost immediately making it impossible to "tap" anything in the top half inch of the screen and extremely irritating. I tried a number of times to access the help-desk but who has an hour a day to stay on hold? By the time I finally got through it was about 10 months into my warranty. The chap I spoke to was very pleasant and advised that I return my Palm for a refurbished model. The return policy was easy and I was impressed by the "just put it back in the box it came in, have the courier service pick it up and we'll sort it all out" and hopefull of a successful result.

The refurbished model I later got turned out to have exactly the same problem once I hot-synched it with my desk-top application (leading me to think it was the software and not the actual device). It was a few more weeks before I had time to brave the help-desk again. This time my one year warranty was up so I was told I could either pay $100 to get it fixed (and risk getting the same [bad] system back again) or buy a new one. I decided to put up with the one I had. Unfortunately the "refurbished" model turned out to be even [worse] than the first one as not only was the screen out of whack, this one randomly "fainted" when I took it off its cradle even when fully recharged, i.e., sometimes I would switch it on and five minutes later it would totally run out of steam and freeze up, sometimes I could take it away for a week-end and it was ok. As it always seemed to pass-out and leave me stranded on the business trips, I took to taking a hard-copy of my contact database with me as a back-up. I am now at the point where I print out my entire database and calendar when I am out of the office AND take my filofax to keep the business cards in.

I am still committed to the idea of the Palm and jealous of my friends' functioning models but am wary of shelling out another [item price] for something ultimately less useful than an etcha-sketch.