After reading this story from this Australian newspaper it makes me think why no one ever told him to come to Dave’s iPAQ 🙂
It was a chaotic fortnight. Peter, an academic, wanted a cheap PDA that would store his contact details and appointments. He bought an iPaq 1930 PocketPC from one of Hewlett-Packard’s bigger resellers.
After two weeks of flat batteries and lost data, he decided it wouldn’t do what he thought it would do. The resellers thought it wouldn’t do what he thought it would do. Even the HP tech support person – somewhere in India – thought it wouldn’t do what he thought it would do.
As it turns out, they were all wrong.
“I thought it would store things like phone numbers, etc,” Peter wrote via email, attaching correspondence. “After two weeks of checking with all manner of folk, HP have now confirmed that the 1900 series of iPaqs don’t. So, if you want an iPaq that stores more than Windows documents and spreadsheets, etc, go for at least a 2200 series, at an RRP of over $500.”
The fact is, of course, the iPaq 1930 stores all the contacts and appointments and documents and spreadsheets, etc, that anyone is likely to want to keep on its 64 MB of internal RAM. So why did the reseller inform the customer, when he first went back to them with a “dead” iPaq, that he should buy an SD-RAM card if he wanted to save the data?
The answer is that they probably didn’t know very much about what they were selling. They didn’t even know enough to warn Peter, before he left the store, that he should connect the unit to his PC or Mac and back it up.
They didn’t warn him he should keep the unit charged. Depending on variables such as screen brightness, he should never have expected more than eight hours of use out of it before he plugged it in to its cradle. That would have avoided the initial shock that he experienced when he came back from 10 days’ absence, and found the iPaq wouldn’t turn on. It also would have avoided his having to re-enter all the lost data.
And the tech support person might have expressed himself a little more thoughtfully, because when he told Peter that when the unit ran out of power, it behaved “like a calculator”, he considered it a fault. And everything went rapidly downhill from there.
They told him that he would need to buy an SD card to save the information. And for reasons that no one can understand, they claimed – incorrectly – he would be limited to a 256 MB card. HP in Australia told him the same thing.
Read the rest from the Sydney Morning Herald