Fatal reset with SONY Clie PEG-S10/U: Why the Palm has died
John Faughnan
failure of the PDA world than any other factor. The original Palm III
devices were justly famous for their reliability. Even the Vx, save
for its defective power switch (power switch slowly over 3-15 months
of use), was robust.
Then came the Palm IIIxe [1]. My wife went through 3 of these. Sooner
or later each would suffer a fatal reset, with loss of all data.
Invariably after she had spent an hour doing data entry, so even after
the tedium of restoring from the desktop work was lost.
The Palm m500 series had different power switch problems.
Most would have given up at that point and abandoned the entire PDA
market. However I continued to use my Vx, with various workarounds
[2]. Giving up on Palm devices, we bought her a SONY Clie PEG-S10/U.
Early on it experienced one fatal reset, but afterwords it seemed
reliable. Slowly, gradually, cautiously she began once again doing
data entry. Today she spent an hour with it, at last once again
considering moving away from her paper planner.
You know what happened next.
Fatal reset.
It will be a cool, breezy day in Hell before she considers relying on
this class of device ever again.
Repeat this story by thousands of adopters. Each will never return.
Each tells their story to their friends. Over time the market shrinks
and shrinks. Eventually someone declares the venture has failed --
people don't want PDAs. They are reluctant to adopt new technology. It
didn't provide enough benefit.
Every explanation will be made, except one. It was a fine idea, but
they HAD TO BE RELIABLE. They used to be, but they aren't any longer.
Ahh, it was a fine promise.
[1] http://www.faughnan.com/palm.html#PalmIIIxe
[2[ http://www.faughnan.com/palm.html#PowerSwitch
john
--
john faughnan
jfau...@spamcop.net
www.faughnan.com
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[meta: Palm, PalmOS, SONY, reliability, defects, adoption, quality,
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Michael Williams
news:5c0dbfb4.03010...@posting.google.com:
> I am convinced that unreliable devices have contributed more to the
> failure of the PDA world than any other factor. The original Palm III
> devices were justly famous for their reliability. Even the Vx, save
> for its defective power switch (power switch slowly over 3-15 months
> of use), was robust.
>
> Then came the Palm IIIxe [1]. My wife went through 3 of these. Sooner
> or later each would suffer a fatal reset, with loss of all data.
> Invariably after she had spent an hour doing data entry, so even after
> the tedium of restoring from the desktop work was lost.
My Windows 98-based laptop is far less reliable than my PDA! I had my Palm
IIIx for 3 years before losing it, and I found it to be very reliable.
Comparatively speaking, I have had lots of trouble with Sony Clie T615 that
I replaced it with: During the second half of a 2-week trip to Asia, my
Clie battery ran low and lost all its contents. (Funny that NEVER happened
with the Palm.) And it continues to crash regularly with that Fatal Reset
error, and even the reset button doesn't work; I have to disassemble the
stylus and use the reset pin. I've also had it continually do a Fatal Reset
on reboot, so that I had to erase the Clie's memory in order to recover.
However, in both cases I was without my data and programs only temporarily.
As with ANY computer, what you do not back up you WILL lose. It's a lesson
I learned a long time ago, when I first started working with computers.
It's also a lesson I had to learn the hard way, by losing hours worth of
work!
You can abandon technology altogether, but if your wife chooses to use a
computer (any computer, PDA or not), make sure she realizes the importance
of backing up her work frequently. (Palms actually make this relatively
easy, compared to PC's.) The guideline I use is: Backup whatever data you
don't want to lose or reenter! That could be 10 minutes of work, 1 hour of
work, 1 record, 10 records, or whatever is significant for you. As you've
noted, consumer-grade computers aren't very reliable, and for several
reasons this situation isn't likely to improve.
--
MBW
San Jose, CA
John Faughnan
> However, in both cases I was without my data and programs only temporarily.
> As with ANY computer, what you do not back up you WILL lose. It's a lesson
> I learned a long time ago, when I first started working with computers.
> It's also a lesson I had to learn the hard way, by losing hours worth of
> work!
I probably should have mentioned that I'm compulsive about backups. We
have redundant cross-LAN multi-format backups on the home LAN and we
have offsite local region tape backups and cross-country data archives
(on my parent's machine in Canada). (Hey, we may want our family
pictures if a meteor takes out our metro region ... :-).
It's rare for me to lose work, despite over 16 years of crashing
computers and at least three hard drive wipe outs. In the old days
(pre-Win2K, pre-OSX) desktop computers crashed often, but my wife and
I very rarely lost any work. We both save our work on desktop machines
every few seconds, or at least every 1-2 minutes (that ctrl-S twitch
is a lifelong habit). Significant data loss occurs only with a drive
failure between backups, or the accidental saving of a older copy of a
file over a newer copy.
That's what we experience on the desktop. We hold the PDA to a HIGHER
standard. It's a simple device running simple software. The promise of
the PalmPilot (original) was RELIABILITY, it didn't lose data. It
could be physically damaged, but it didn't lose data in the absence of
hacks (it was also made in the USA, btw). PDA users want the robust
reliability they get from a paper planner (especially if they've never
LOST their paper planner).
Modern PDAs don't deliver the reliability of the original 2MB plastic
bodied PalmPilot.
I stand by my thesis. I think my wife's experience is not rare, and I
think none of those people, many of whom don't experience data loss on
any platform, will return to the PDA.
The PDA market is, to put it mildly, unhealthy. It is a mere shadow of
what we expected in the glory days of the "palm economy". I think
experiences like my wife's are part of the explanation.
For my part, I intend to start collecting used Palm Vxs (since I can
work around the power switch problem) until the cows come home (or
until Apple puts out a PDA -- I might try their's). SONY and Palm have
failed us once too often, and Compaq iPaqs have a reputation for
unreliability that makes the Palm IIIx look good.
john
PS. I forgot to mention that there's a KNOWN defect in the SONY Clie
my wife uses that causes a Fatal Reset with data loss. SONY has a
patch on its web site for that; we've always had the patch installed.
(It must be reinstalled after any complete reset.)
PPS. Some months ago I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal on
the topic of declining reliability in the PDA marketplace. I'm not the
only one to point out that this has been a very serious problem for
this industry.
--
john faughnan
jfau...@spamcop.net
www.faughnan.com
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[meta: Palm, SONY CLIE, reliabiliy, customer retention, expectations,
data loss, hard reset, marketing, PDA market failure, 030108,
jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, jgf616468]
John Faughnan
Michael, I posted another reply to this, but then I thought more about
how you said your IIIx was so reliable. I owe the IIIx an apology. I
remember it as a VERY reliable device. My wife had THREE IIIxes that
were terribly unreliable, not the IIIx. I think the IIIx was one of
the last Palm devices made in the USA, it was as reliable as the
original PalmPilot. I had a Palm III (similar to the IIIx, less
memory) that I gave to a friend when I got my Vx, he used it for years
without a single glitch until he lost it.
Your experience with your SONY CLIE T615 is similar to my wife's
experience with the SONY Clie PEG-S10/U. In particular the S10 will
ALSO lose all data if the batteries drain completely (unlike the Palm
which could live for some time in a moribund state with low battery
power).
Don't you find the unreliability of these PDAs shocking? If not,
you've got much lower expectations than I have (or most users have).
More in my other posting, but I did want to correct my slur on the
noble IIIx.
john
Jim Thompson
Your post makes a great deal of sense. I have also been in computers
a long time (30 years -- gulp), and Palms since they came out in 1997.
This latest glitch with my Clie NR70V (see the "Help! Clie NR70 black
screen, will not respond" thread) has made me nervous about going
travelling with just my Clie (and not the laptop), whereas I was never
uneasy about travelling with just the Palm3x. Even my HandEra
unexpectedly got into hard resets that required restores from the CF
card, which were never completely satisfactory.
But I must say my iPaq 3650 has been remarkably reliable. I've had it
for two years now. It has become the mainstay for navigation on our
boat (I only fired up the laptop in port between runs to edit the next
leg of the journey). It has been sitting under my desk in its
charging cable for several months since the end of the boating season.
When I recently pulled it up to begin planning for the coming season,
it turned on immmediately and went right back to work. Never had a
problem with it.
But overall I fully agree with your call for higher reliability in
these devices. We should expect better from handhelds.
Jim Thompson
http://www.jimthompson.net/palmpda
On 8 Jan 2003 19:02:49 -0800, jfau...@spamcop.net (John Faughnan)
wrote:
>Michael Williams <usene...@mikew.mailshell.com> wrote in message news:<Xns92FD8E6C...@126.102.4.128>...
Michael Williams
> Don't you find the unreliability of these PDAs shocking? If not,
> you've got much lower expectations than I have (or most users have).
> More in my other posting, but I did want to correct my slur on the
> noble IIIx.
Yes, I am quite disappointed in my Clie T615. It has fantastic features,
but it's reliability has me missing my Palm IIIx. I have only one data
point to offer, but like I said, in the 3 years that I had that workhorse,
never, not even once, did I lose any data from the device. I have had more
problems in the 3 months I've had my Clie than in those 3 years I had my
IIIx.
I didn't realize it until you mentioned it, but my expectations of
reliability are indeed lower than they used to be: I appear to have given
up hoping for more-reliable computing devices (be they PC's or PDA's).
That's why I stressed the importance of backing up these latest devices:
If you don't, you're gambling with your data, plain and simple. No, I
don't approve of this trend--if I had my way, I'd impose a "feature freeze"
on the most problematic products until the existing bugs are fixed--but the
reality of the marketplace is that more money can be made on new products
with new features rather than fixing existing problems with current
products. I don't see that changing unless the economics do.
I wonder what (besides moving back to pen & paper) we lowly consumers can
do to reverse this trend?
Mike Meyer
> Yes, I am quite disappointed in my Clie T615. It has fantastic features,
> but it's reliability has me missing my Palm IIIx. I have only one data
> point to offer, but like I said, in the 3 years that I had that workhorse,
> never, not even once, did I lose any data from the device. I have had more
> problems in the 3 months I've had my Clie than in those 3 years I had my
> IIIx.
Thank you for the data point. My experience with my Vx - now going on
four years - matches yours. I've never lost data I've put on it. While
I was thinking about upgrading to a Clie, I think you've just made up
my mind.
> I wonder what (besides moving back to pen & paper) we lowly consumers can
> do to reverse this trend?
Vote with your wallet. Possibly returning the Clie and getting a
Palm-manufactured device, assuming they are more reliable. Any reports
from users of those?
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <m...@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.
Old Man Flair
>IIIx for 3 years before losing it, and I found it to be very reliable.
A couple of thoughts comparing/contrasting PDA's and PC's:
1. Through personal experience with friends and family, I feel that
the PC "explosion" didn't occur until PC's became entrenched in our
lives. Schools now require them. Most workplaces now have them.
E-mail is almost as commonplace as snail-mail. Many advertisements
now promote web sites of companies. Business is more than ever
conducted in cyberspace. Excepting those in the industry and the
small percentage of population that considers themselves cybergeeks,
we can probably assume that PC's succeeded in being so pervasive
despite it's well-documented lack of reliability. Will PDA's ever be
this pervasive? Will they be a part of our lives as much as our PC's
are? And if so, will reliability matter any more than it does for
PC's?
2. Many PC's are unreliable due to buggy operating systems; many
others are unreliable due to buggy third-party application code and
novices' inability or unwillingness to do a little preliminary
diagnosing. My old Win98SE machine was quite reliable until I started
messing with installing other software on top of it. Usually,
uninstalling the offending application corrected the problem. I
always kept track of what software, drivers, updates, etc., I
performed last so that I could "undo" if the machine started getting
unstable. I currently experience this on my Palm M515 also:
rock-solid until I "play" with some quirky new app (the latest was a
LauncherX demo), with a little uninstalling of the app restoring the
Palm to its former reliable self. Specific problems aside (M5xx SUDS,
etc.), is it possible that we're hearing about PDA reliability
problems much more often now because: a.) PDA's nowadays have lots of
surplus memory for installing these buggy apps and b.) more "novices"
are using PDA's and reporting issues without performing a little
self-diagnosis?
Don
You may be onto something here. My PDA has PalmOS 4.0 and I have had
only one occasion to perform a hard reset (when I was trying to get the
ROM to download through the USB port and it appeared to hang -- I never
tried it again so I can't say that it really *did* hang). However, as I
have a copy of POSE, I always install a new app to the emulator and run
it with a debug ROM installed before letting it gain access to the
hardware version. With none of the debug options disabled I see a large
number of applications which trigger warnings and cause soft resets in
debug mode. This leads me to suspect that there are many programs out
there which did not heed the development guidelines regarding things
like accessing structure elements directly, accessing the screen
directly, etc. Since C is the primary development language for PalmOS
applications and C makes it easy to address memory that shouldn't be
touched (not always accidentally and not always on purpose) it isn't
hard to imagine a scenario such as you describe.
John Faughnan
> > I wonder what (besides moving back to pen & paper) we lowly consumers can
>
> Vote with your wallet. Possibly returning the Clie and getting a
> Palm-manufactured device, assuming they are more reliable. Any reports
> from users of those?
Palm's reliability has been in the toilet since they put out the Vx
(which was a great device except for the power switch). A friend of
mine had two HandSpring's with defective memory; she finally returned
to paper.
Not enough consumers care about reliability, but consumers are VERY
cost sensitive. So it's a race to the bottom - cut costs "at any
price".
I wonder if Apple we ever put out a branded PDA? I might try that. For
now I just look for old Vx devices. I'm starting to stockpile them.
john
[meta: jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, Palm, SONY, CLIE, HandSpring, lifespan,
reliability, consumer choice, quality, reliability, PDA, handheld]
Arthur Hagen
"John Faughnan" <jfau...@spamcop.net> wrote in message
news:5c0dbfb4.03011...@posting.google.com...
> I wonder if Apple we ever put out a branded PDA? I might try that.
Never heard of the Newton?
Regards,
--
*Art
John Faughnan
Oh yes, I do remember the Newton fondly. I'm told the OS was a bit of
a mess under the surface (huge time pressures don't lead to clean
architectures), but I recall the device was quite reliable. It
suffered from a mismatch between marketing expectations and
implementable technology, and it was too big and heavy (this was
before Lithium Gel batteries, for example).
There are many rumors about Apple's plans, from becoming a Palm
licensee to a Symbian deal to extending iPod (which, shades of the
original PalmPilot, uses a licensed RTOS) to partnering with SONY on
an 800x600 mini-slate. I have no idea what they'll do; Apple has
become very good at keeping secrets and surprising both amateur and
professional analysts. The safest bet is that they'll keep the iPod a
read-only device and add more ability to view iSync data and view
photos. I really need data entry capabilities, so that wouldn't work
for me.
I'm interested in Apple products because:
1. They have a VERY strong brand (maybe the last brand left in
technology) and thus have SOME motivation to make a reliable product.
(Though iPod battery problems show yet again that they are not
infallible -- not by any means!)
2. They charge a premium price on their products for a "premium"
market. So there's enough of a margin to pay for testing and quality
control -- if they decide that's important. (Most vendors have more
price pressure than Apple has; though that's not to say Apple is
profitable!)
[meta: jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, Apple, PDA, reliability, NewtonOS,
marketing, finance, branding, sales, image, Palm, PalmOS]