Well, I'm back. I received my "new" replacement Pre about a month ago today (complete with a bit of oreo effect not present on my original pre that's screen cracked in the peacock pattern from the center button up).

This morning I realized I had forgtten to charge it last night while answering a phonecall (it was down to 14% thanks to the pre's legendary poor battery life). So I plugged her in,walked away, and 2 hours later wallah! A nice new fan of cracks coming from the center button!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was even more careful with this one then my original (which I still babied) and I guess it shows -it lasted 33 days instead of 5 days like my first pre.

I called the number again, and they are replacing it from palm AGAIN, with the standard 400$ hold on my account until my pre arrives at their location. Excellent service experienced by palm, but an ABSOLUTELY FLAWED product. I don't care how careful you are, it doesn't matter, this thing is cracking screens and it appears (in my experience anyway) that it is caused by flexing inside the case caused by an expanding and/or heating battery on charging. The heat/cool cycle and relevant expansion is somehow causing the screen to crack at the center bottom button (I'm guessing it somehow touches the screen on the inside of the phone or perhaps the touchscreen is cut in a circle around the button, not sure how the center button is related but the cracks are absolutely fanning out from there).

It's not a handling issue, my phone is once again perfect, absolutely untouched, unscratched, and NEVER dropped. This is going to happen to everyone's pre until they address the underlying defect. It may take longer for some (perhaps they don't deeply drain the battery or use the phone heavily - I do, as this is my business phone and gets heavy use online and in voice use), but it's going to happen. 

wow, that is awful.  i feel for you.

question - did you have any kind of screen protector applied to the device?  i'm asking because it got me thinking - i use zagg's shield, put it on the device the day i got it.  i do not have any cracks (i know many do not, just saying), and i'm wondering of the additional surface tension of the zagg helps some with the expanding and contracting of the device....

just a thought.

When my wife and I bought our Palm Pres we both had the Ghost Armor protection applied.  Her screen cracked anyway.  My screen has never cracked, but sadly someone has stolen it and family locator doesn't help.

My suspicion is that during the manufacturing process to much pressure is applied while installing the button causing micro crackes in some screens.  Then with the slightest heating/cooling stress applied the cracks grow to be visible.

Shield has -nothing- to do with it.

The cracks are internal, the shield only protects the outside from scratches and scuffs. 

Zagg will NOT keep this from happening. 

Heck, the guy at palm while I was on the phone with him acknowledged the problem and explained that they knew all about it and we're working to fix it (he actually mentioned this thread). He even suggested the Pixi as a solution, as it doesnt have the center button and would likely not suffer from this clear defect.

I replied that I wouldn't be getting a Pixi, as I work in an office full of mature professionals, with professional clients, and wouldn't be there whipping out my "Pixi" every time I wanted to make a phone call if I actually wanted any semblance of respect in the office.

Way to go palm, kill nearly half of your potential client base for the handset by naming your product incredibly stupidly. You may as well have called it the "Hello Kitty" phone and added pretty pink stickers. People can try to defend this or say the name doesn't matter, but it does for most of the male population ages 8 to 80. Hell, my great grandfather would roll over in his grave to make fun of me if I was using a Pixi. I'm sure the phone will be popular among the fairer gender, and of course in San Fransisco... Not saying that's a bad thing, maybe that's the market Palm is trying to target here.....

 What's worse, I actually like the Pixi in every other aspect.

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ncinerate wrote:

Heck, the guy at palm while I was on the phone with him acknowledged the problem and explained that they knew all about it and we're working to fix it (he actually mentioned this thread). He even suggested the Pixi as a solution, as it doesnt have the center button and would likely not suffer from this clear defect.

 

I replied that I wouldn't be getting a Pixi, as I work in an office full of mature professionals, with professional clients, and wouldn't be there whipping out my "Pixi" every time I wanted to make a phone call if I actually wanted any semblance of respect in the office.

 

Way to go palm, kill nearly half of your potential client base for the handset by naming your product incredibly stupidly. You may as well have called it the "Hello Kitty" phone and added pretty pink stickers. People can try to defend this or say the name doesn't matter, but it does for most of the male population ages 8 to 80. Hell, my great grandfather would roll over in his grave to make fun of me if I was using a Pixi. I'm sure the phone will be popular among the fairer gender, and of course in San Fransisco... Not saying that's a bad thing, maybe that's the market Palm is trying to target here.....

 

 What's worse, I actually like the Pixi in every other aspect.

 

 

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Wifi or not, it doesn't matter if it's the jesus phone, pixi isn't for me. They could have called it a Palm PX, or a palm PIX, or hey, a palm PIXEL, but PIXI absolutely rounds me out of that equation (and I'd be willing to bet the majority of men are with me in this). May as well call it a Palm Smalldongle or something for the amount of flak any male using one is going to take.

I agree with the Pre's fragility issue though (as if going through 2 cracked screens in just a hair over one month isn't proof enough of my agreement). Anyone who owns one of these Pre's has got to recognize just how poor the reliability is compared to other phones in operation. I've owned cellphones going back to a giant BRICK and prior to this Pre I have -never- had a handset break on me.I am surrounded at work by other smartphones (blackberries and iphones mostly) and I have never seen one broken in my office of a few hundred people. I see their phones, Iphones with scratched bezels and scuffs from obvious abuse and dropping, blackberries practically worn down to chunks of white ABS plastic due to their HEAVY use. These things are well used, and they hold up to that abuse. Then there's my Pre (the only pre in the office).

My pre would scratch if I even LOOKED at it funny thanks to it's soft plastic fingerprint-happy screen (and you'd better have a spotlessly clean piece of glasses-cloth to clean it off because one missed grain of sand is going to ruin the face). I -never- drop it, because I'm 100% certain it would break in half if I ever did. The slider is loose as a goose and requires 2 hands to VERY CAREFULLY slide it open, and it shakes and twists in a way it absolutely shouldn't (and was like this from the day I got it as a trade-in for my first shattered-screen Pre which was admittedly much more tightly built). The keyboard creaks cheaply as I type on it. To top it off at this point I'm pretty sure I need to buy 365 batteries so I can simply swap out a full one and NEVER charge the **bleep** thing (because charging it means the screen will crack and shatter with absolutely no outside intervention required).

The guys at work who we're impressed with the Pre's features when I first purchased it, have now made it the joke of the office. They see me charging the **bleep** thing multiple times every day, they see me without it for days at a time because the screen cracked, again. They laugh as I daintily pull it out of it's protective case, carefully opening it with 4 fingers. They hear me cursing Sprint on the phone because they refuse to even acknoledge there's a problem or replace the handset (don't even get me started on sprint service, BAH). I can't say what it means for the future of Palm as a company, but I work around a -lot- of people who will very likely never even consider a palm product at this point thanks to my dreadful experience. Compare this to the first guy in my office who got an Iphone. He showed it off, gushed about it non-stop, NEVER had any problems with it. We all agreed the phone was incredible, and within 6 months nearly EVERYONE had one. The only thing I ever hear them complaining about is the AT&T network, and many of these people would absolutely switch phones if there was something to compete. The Pre looked like -that- phone, and many people at work we're intially jealous of my amazing rate plan with Sprint and my super-cool multitasking phone with a physical keyboard.

They aren't jealous anymore.

Oh, and finally, Palm. As a customer I shouldnt have to track down some odd 407 area code number that seems to be listed NOWHERE BUT HERE, call it, ignore all verbal prompts given on the phonecall, then finally get connected to someone who can help. If this is an issue you guys need to be a bit more proactive in getting the word out, maybe setup a specific hotline that is obviously the way to contact you on these issues, or get sprint to properly allow replacment of handsets at the **bleep** service centers like the one 3 miles from my front door.

I bought my palm pre this July and it works well on me. From my observation, the reason why people get their palm pre cracked around the center bottom is because they put their thumbs flat on the bottom and push. For me, I only push the bottom with my finger nail tips. If you have your fingers flat on the bottom and push, you are pushing not only the bottom but also the area that around the bottom which is made by fragile plastic that cannot tolerate the pushing force cycles. In Mechanical Engineering, it is called “Fatigue”.

Here I have to bring Apple’s Iphone out. The center bottom from an Iphone is big. You can put your finger flat on it and push. I believe if the bottom of an Iphone is as small as palm pre, you will see the same problem on an Iphone. Though I’ve been careful with my palm Pre, crack still happened. It’s on the volume bottom side of the pre. In the beginning I didn’t aware until it developed into a significant crack. I applied a tiny little bit of super glue that it works for now. If the crack keeps developing, I probably will have my pre changed as well.

I'm a student major in Electrical Engineering. I love palm products, my last palm product was Palm centro. It was a solid build gadget. From Palm Centro to palm pre, I can see that the quality control of Palm became loose. I wish Palm can realize that otherwise it will lose a significant number of its users especially after the competition of Google Anoid phones.