Dear Palm Corporation: My $500 phone is a piece of shit.

My Palm Treo 600 is one of the most frustrating pieces of technology I own. AT&T Wireless sold me one of these lovely beta monsters for half a grand just under a year ago. I loved it. I called it my external brain. I could send email and take notes anywhere. It kept me organized. I didn't care about those wierd orange dots, no big deal. Then the screen died. AT&T had sold me insurance for $5 a month but a very nice gentleman in India talked to me for an hour to convince me that under no circumstances would their insurance company actually honor their policy. I called up a friend who worked at AT&T Wireless and he gave me the inside dirt: that it was company policy _NEVER_ to honor insurance for the Palm Treo. Palm left me out in the cold too. Their support policy was: buy another one.

The sad thing is, I did. I bought a freakin armor case for the thing made out of aircraft grade aluminum. Another $500. It was great. I loved it.

Except when it crashed. Sometimes it would just lock up and hang, no buttons would do anything. It was like Microsoft Windows 98, except it was my cell phone. But I figured out how to make it go again- just reinstall the OS from the ground up, and poof. It would work again. 3 months ago it crashed on the Saturday before Memorial day, while I was up in Detroit. Knowing the technical aspects of Earth would be close on Sunday and Monday, I busted ass for 5 hours hunting around Detroit cell phone stores for a USB-to-Treo cable to reinstall the OS. I got thrown out of 2 closing cell phone stores. I got the cable from a Sprint store north of Ann Arbor.

Now, my OS trick doesn't work. There's no on-off switch on the thing, so I'm hoping it runs out of juice and reboots. But basically, this thing is toast. It's so crashed the cursor stopped blinking.

This phone has freed my memory-challenged mind sooooo much. But I'm not giving these bastards another half grand when they don't stand behind their product. I may just mail them the two dead phones and something about fooling me twice.

Update: I got the thing to hang with a lighted screen, so it ran out of juice. I then plugged the power in while holding down the factory reset button and it booted. I flattened the OS, and now it's working again. This is the 7th time the phone has locked up. I'm just going to keep riding it until it dies, and then switch to some other phone.

Love/hate.