Disaster on the High Sea
by Kevin CrossmanWhile on a cruise, I took my brand-new m505 into the john for a little e-book reading. Upon completing my duties I stuffed it in my shirt pocket for safe-keeping. Unfortunately, the bathrooms on a cruise-ship are pretty tight, so I had to bend way over to flush. Before I flushed, I was distracted by something...my m505 slipping out of my pocket and down into the crapper!
Luckily, not much water was present so the device was not completely submerged...it did, however, fall down upon the hotsync port. I quickly retrieved it and did my best to wipe off the water and, uh, other bits of contamination.
The screen showed a strange error message regarding a hotsync problem and upon soft-resetting the thing would just not start up again. I was now on vacation without my games and e-books which I had planned to whittle the time away with (including the upcoming long airport layovers).
To make matters worse, I lost several hours worth of writing in my journal/logs. No backups, obviously.
To make matters even more worse, my wife's m505 suffers no ill-effects (naturally!). I felt so sick about it, I couldn't even touch hers for a day. After that, it was only half-hearted.
The story ends on a high note. I called Palm and they basically replaced the unit and did so in about a week (less if I had overnighted it). I ended up with a Hungarian model (rather than my original, which was a USA model) -- however the screen backlighting is noticeably brighter than my old model -- and my wife's.
Thank you Palm.