Dell complaints

[techydude]

I've searched but can't find any mention of this issue elsewhere on this site. I am keen to gauge how many people are encountering this issue - Please respond (or at least vote in the poll - X50/X50v customers only please .


I’m currently “engaging” with Dell (in the one-way manner customers usually must with Dell) regarding their hopelessly bungled upgrade to Windows Mobile v5 on the Axim X50/X50v series of PDAs.

This upgrade CD, charged at a nominal fee of about US$40, was announced nearly a year ago for release in Q3-2005. It eventually materialised in late-October05, and X50/X50v owners are STILL (May 4 2006) waiting for an update to fix a slew of major debilitating bugs in the initial release. Thier official line is “retrograde to PocketPC 2003SE, and we’ll let you know when a fixed Windows Mobile v5 ROM update is ready”.

How they could have released it at all is absolutely beyond comprehension - several of the bugs are obvious the first time you switch it on and use it for 15 minutes, it runs like a dog, Bluetooth support is minimal, not to mention waking up the next morning to a dead flat battery (theoretically switched off all night).

Can the need to be first to market be so overwhelming as to somehow justify such glaringly irrational self-sabotage to their own company and its reputation? Has no one in Dell learned any lesson from IT history?

Coincidentally(?), they released the X51/X51v range in September 2005 which does in practise run WMv5 (bundled out-of-the-box) quite well!

If they’d had the guts to say “hey, we made a mistake, WMv5 just isn’t gonna run well on the X50/X50v range, so here’s your WMv5 Upgrade CD money back, or a healthy discount on an upgrade to the X51 range, an awful lot of people would have saved themselved an awful lot of time and frustration trying to get WMv5 working better on their Axim. Lord knows (but I wonder if Dell now does?) how many threw their hands up in the air and went elsewhere, but 2nd-hand X50/X50v prices on eBay would suggest lots!

To the credit of mostly rank-amateur but highly loyal and dedicated (and seemingly time-rich) geeks in forums, they’ve found (or even WRITTEN THEIR OWN) fixes, hacks, patches and work-arounds for many of the problems that are truly Dell’s responsibility alone. No thanks at all to Dell, the X50/X50v now runs WMv5 barely adequately - BUT ONLY IF YOU'RE PREPARED TO SPEND A LOT OF TIME WADING THROUGH HUNDREDS OF FORUM POSTS (like www.aximsite.com) TO FIND EACH NECESSARY FIX!

Judging from many Axim forum posts (on other sites), Dell’s tech-support & customer service on this issue has been downright evasive and even deceptive.

The gobsmacking shocker here is that Dell are STILL offering for sale the WMv5 upgrade CD for the X50/X50v! Are they just collectively stupid (an inconceivable notion for any group of money-incentivated people, I know…), or have Dell marketing staff taken the damage-management staff out the back and shot them for the sake of a bit of extra revenue? More likely just avoiding admiting in any public way that this upgrade was a mistake… {slaps forehead in disbelief}

cheers, Anthony.

I've searched but can't find any mention of this issue elsewhere on this site. I am keen to gauge how many people are encountering this issue - Please respond (or at least vote in the poll - X50/X50v customers only please .