Comments on: Centro Now On Sale in Europe

http://www.expansys.com/p.aspx?i=162933

Tempting if your looking to buy a Palm smartphone compared to £254.95 for the Treo 680 on the same website (£15 more for the crimson model..

Unless you already have a '680 that is.

(Treo 500 shows at £244.95 with 7 day shipping estimate upon order).

IIIe>IIIxe>m125>m130>T3>TE>T3>TX / Treo680

Jesus said : 'I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'
John's Gospel ch. 14 vs 6, NIV

Well, I've waited patiently until morning of the 14th and still the "coming the 14th" was on Palm site...late morning...lunch time...well, at lunch time you could access the shop and get a Centro but the shopping button was giving a "Bad Request (400) Your request to the server could not be understood. Please check to ensure that the request you made is correct."!!!
Palm was updating the site...30 minutes later everything was fine, order made and it will ship in 3/4 working days.

So, it was a half smile because at the end I was almost to the point to make my mind and stop buying Palm at all. Are Palm european managers lazy or is it Palm as a whole not interested in selling its products? You don't need people up at night to keep your shops open dear Palm! This is the internet era and all you need is a running server. So, what is the excuse to update your shopping site only late during the day? Is it professional to make all the shopping site un-available for half an hour because you are updating it...14 hours late off schedule?

I owned Palm Treo 600/650/680/750. The passage from Treo 680 to Treo 750 was motivated by my feeling I needed a modern os...six months later my Treo 750 found its place on eBay because even if updated to WinMo 6 the os is way too slow for me (often I lost incoming phone calls because WinMo refused to swich from a phone call to another!!).

So, here I am back at Palm Os waiting next year for the new interaction...once you were the todays Apple of the mobile gadgets...now you seems more like...the Atari of the "Fall of the videogames era".
Please Palm, execute well you plans and keep your promises!

I've tried ordering the Centro from Denmark so many times now - no luck - and I keep getting a shop where there's no Centro or 404 error or finally it's available for pre-order but when getting to the checkout point (perhaps 10th time now these past three days) I get the:

We are sorry that our site is temporarily unavailable, please try again later. Alternatively the Palm eStore team are available on 0845 090 0265 and via customerservice.en@palm.com to answer your queries on Palm products and how to order.

Note that this is _after_ you go through the ordering details.
I've tried calling that number. They say no units are avaiable anywhere in Europe and I can only wait for the webpage to be functional. They'll mail me when (pre)ordering is possible and Centro units are finally here.

Not sure it's appropriate that Palm takes a swipe at RIM ("And more importantly, no nationwide blackouts.") when they can't deliver the phones or even take pre-orders in Europe three days after launching.

I think perhaps Palm has no Q&A department checking their customer experience (at least outside the US).

Cheers
- David

I phoned the Palm store a couple of minutes later and bought another Centro (I needed two) and the order number had gone up more than 20...

In short - Stock's in europe is now available at last through phone only :)

- David