New option for Palm / Sony / Palm OS handheld repairs

[headcronie]

You can find his repair options here
http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZitsnothere
Diagnosis fee is $5.00! 100% satisfaction.

I've not yet used his services, but should I need it (luckily for me), this would be a short drive!

I'm still looking for a permanent website, etc to link to. Hope this provides an alternative to expensive corporate prices.

Edit: Email address obtained via Bab2000 in post 27 of this thread
ips -AT- chartermi -DOT- net
Email address is modified, so as to not be targeted by spammers. Please fix the address before attempting to email.

Taken from the Inquirer:

One man company fixes PDAs

Don't throw away your dead Palm or Clie!


By Fernando Cassia: Friday 23 December 2005, 08:37

IF I TOLD YOU that a single-man company from Mankato, Minnesota beats the hell out of the official repair services provided by the wealthy corporations that make them, would you believe me?. Well, you better do, because that's exactly what I discovered when I ran into Chris Short. He's a man this river town southwest of Minneapolis, who advertises his services on eBay and not only that, he actually delivers what he promises.
It's no surprise then that he enjoys a 100% positives rating on the popular retail site. Here's my story, which will show you why I don't hesitate to recommend his services, which allowed me to get my PDA back in working order while spending one third of what the official Sony service wanted to charge me.


Chris Short: PalmOS PDA repairs guru

To make a long story short...
This story actually started some months ago, when I went through pda-repair hell, trying to get Sony to repair my broken PalmOS PDA, a beautiful Clie NX80V with mp3 playback, swinging LCD screen and 1.3MP digital camera. The device fell from a table to the floor and it just died. Swapping the battery with a new one didn't help, nor did fiddling with the power switch. The little details of the ordeal can be found here.

To make a long story "Chris Short" ... I had a beautiful and powerful but dead PDA at a friend's place in the U.S., and it was out of warranty. That left me with two options: tell my U.S. friend to throw the pda away or auction it as non working. Definitely I didn't want to spend any more greenbacks on long distance international phone calls to the Sony's voice recognition IVR hell to obtain a new RMA#.

Apparently the guys who do Clie repairs on behalf of Sony charge a "flat fee" of... $150 greenbacks for out-of-warranty PDAs. No way I was going to spend half of what I originally paid for the device back in mid 2004. So I started looking at PDA repair services. There was a promising one in Canada, and several others U.S. based, but all of them made the process sound complex and required one to submit credit card/billing information in advance.

Enter Chris Short
My search quest led me to find something strange: an eBay seller offering "BROKEN Palm Evaluation and Repair Service -FULL SERVICE", for a low $5 dollars. Sounded too good to be true, but the "100% positives" convinced me. Since the item description said he specialized on "All Zire models, All Tungsten models, Palm III / IIIe / IIIxe / IIIc, V, Vx, IBM Workpad models C500/C505, Palm m500 / m505 / m515 / m100 / m105 / m125 / m130 and all Handspring Visor models" I decided to email him, following his own suggestion: "If your Palm is not listed email me first-". I did just that.

A Human Being responded to my e-mail: "sure, I can have a look at your Sony Clie". I still had my doubts but he quickly explained his techie background, which killed any fear I had left: Mr. Short has a "BS Electronic Engineering Technology/Computer Science degree from the University of Minnesota Mankato", and describes himself as someone "with an early fascination with electronics and computers from the age of 10 at least", adding "I would make weekly bike rides to the local dump for electronic parts, and my first computer was the Commodore VIC-20". That was enough proof for me that I was speaking to a techie at heart. Someone who would take good care of my PDA.

"If you have your unit evaluated and decide not to have it repaired this is your ONLY cost and your unit will be returned via Priority Mail requiring no additional cost! If, upon receiving a firm quote, you decide to have your unit repaired it will be completed within TWO (2) days ? unless a longer observation period is required such as a infrequent error or battery charge evaluation", he concluded. I was sold.

A few days later after Chris Short received my PDA, I received an e-mail message, which shows he really is a human being and not a corporate robot throwing canned replies:

"Fernando, I have completed the evaluation of your Sony PDA, there was a cold solder joint on the motherboard. The total for the repair will be $49, if you would like a new battery please add $15 - the one that was provided is no good. Your unit is ready, and can be sent out as early as Tuesday."

Wow. I was so impressed that I told him I was going to write an article about him, so here is how Chris Short tells his own story:

"I started first working with Palms with the m100, bought a non functioning one, needed parts so I bought another and before I knew it I had around 25 units with close to 10 that worked fine. Tried in vain to get my wife to use one and decided to start selling them on eBay in the year 2000. Since then my inventory has exploded with some 600 plus units for repair/sale and a daily order of repairs from customers. I estimate I have repaired more than 6000 units. I have one employee which I have taught from the ground up and now does a lot of the routine repairs allowing myself to do research and design work. Latest design project is a Palm V charger that will use a common 5 VDC adapter instead of the impossible to find dual voltage OEM units. My current most respected Palm unit is the Vx - I vote as the most durable and trouble free while sticking to the true essence of what a PDA should be, close second is the m500 series. Currently I am a Sole Proprietor and am working on getting a business name and web site". Wow!,

[minimalposter]

Good post HC Maybe I should delete mine as your title is more descriptive.

This guy is great though -- and somewhere near you if I am not mistaken

<mp begins to wonder why he has never seen headchronie and the palm repair guy at the same time and same place ...>

[headcronie]

Quite close infact, within a 2 hour drive. That's not too shabby for me. I've already emailed him asking about a perm website, so we can direct BH peeps to him.

I've not met him.. but maybe some day.

[Ariell]

Thank you so much for the great tip about Chris Short!!!!!!

The guy is awesome!!! I've been fooling around trying to figure out what's wrong with my Palm for days and he diagnosed the problem right away.

I thought my Palm was fried. It just stopped working. Basically it was just frozen in the on position -- the touchscreen didn't work, none of the buttons worked, I couldn't even turn it off.

I checked out the online support at Palm and following their advice, tried a soft reset. No luck. Tried several times more. No luck. It defaulted back to the recalibration screen but nothing onscreen worked. So I tried a warm reset. Nothing. Then finally in desperation, a hard reset. Still nothing. Well, I could at least turn it on and off but now it defaulted back to the original welcome screen but still nothing on screen worked.

I contacted Palm tech support and they had me fully drain the battery, charge it for 3-4 hours and then try to do a hotsync to restore the user from the desktop software onto my Palm. That didn't work. It just wouldn't hotsync. Nothing happened.

Well, after seeing the tip about Chris, I followed the link to ebay (he uses the login name "itsnothere" on ebay). I emailed him to ask about shipping costs to Canada and asked if he did any phone consulting (which I said I would pay him for).

Well, he wrote back right away and asked what the problem was. I explained all the details as above. And he again wrote back right away to say it sounded like either a problem with something stuck under the touchscreen (so it was sending a constant signal) or that one of the buttons was stuck.

So all I did was run my fingernail around the edge of screen and voila, it worked perfectly again. I was soooo thrilled. I was starting to think I would just have to pitch it.

Literally, from the time I first emailed him to the time my Palm was back and running, it was no more than 15 minutes. Meanwhile, Palm had me futzing around for days.

I can't say enough good things about Chris. He knows his stuff when embarrassingly, Palm didn't seem to. They never mentioned anything about the touchscreen. He took the time to help me out FOR FREE when he could have just told me to send it in and he'd take a look at it. I even said after it was back working again that I still wanted to pay him but he said it was no problem.

So guys, if you have a problem with your Palm, I STRONGLY STRONGLY STRONGLY encourage you to contact Chris. A really honest guy who really knows his stuff.

[minimalposter]

Great review! Its good to hear about well meaning people. So what PDA did he save?

And welcome to BH Ariell. You are off to a great start so I sure hope you stay and get involved

[Ariell]

Thanks minimal. I actually got here by fluke really -- I followed a link on the Palm site and thought that I was going to Palm's discussion board. But this is much better!

I have a Palm Zire 71 and I absolutely LOVE it. I use it all the time so I was so bummed out when I couldn't get it to work. I thought I was going to have to pitch it because nothing seemed to work. I even started looking at used Palms on ebay! But luckily I didn't need to because it's working great again now. I'm so thrilled.

[tals]

If he ever gets a web site can you post here - subscribed to this thread. Whilst my PDA is currently A OK - nice to know their is someone out their who won't fleece you if it does need assistance.

Tals

[headcronie]

I've asked Chris about this again.. Hopefuly he's had some time, since the article came out, to put one together.

[headcronie]

Just heard back from Chris. As of yet, no website. He's still been too busy to get to one. Business must be good.

[jtdarlington]

Another hearty endorsement for Mr. Short: My story, for those who which to peruse it.