Repair of my HTC Advantage Part 1

While traveling over the weekend, I had the interesting experience of having the microdrive in my HTC Advantage die. This post is likely to be the first in a series chronicling my experiences with HTC's customer service. So far, so bad. As a bit of background, the Advantage had been acting strangely for several months. The microdrive would disappear from Windows Mobile's device list. No error messages were reported. The device (and all of its files) just disappeared. Usually a soft reset would make the drive reappear and life would be beautiful once more.

Then something more serious happened. Over 400 MB of information disappeared from the directory listing on the microdrive. When I attempted to restore the lost data, I was informed that the 8 GB device only had 43 MB of available storage. Since the drive was nearly empty, I came to the conclusion that the drive was corrupted. I reformatted the drive and was able to reload everything. Once again, no error messages were presented by Windows Mobile 6. (Do I spot a trend here?)

The device failed completely while I was coming back from my visit to Kansas City (Mmmmm barbecue). So, I called HTC's customer service. This number was extremely hard to find on HTC's website. When I spoke with the polite customer service representative, I discovered that I had called the wrong number. I needed to speak with someone from the repair/return authorization department. I was given a different toll-free number and told the times they were available.

On Monday, I called HTC's repair department bright and early. Once again, the customer service representative was polite and friendly. After discussing what had been happening with the representative, I was given a return authorization number and told to ship the system to a address in Houston. I was also told that the company was going to charge me $38 just to examine the device. If they determined that it was not a warranty issue, i.e., the damage could be attributed to abuse, the company would present the cost to repair the device to me. If I chose not to pay that price, they would ship the broken machine back to me "as is." Furthermore, they'd keep the $38 "triage fee." If I did choose to pay for the repair, the HTC wizards would perform some incantation and the machine would become well. This wasn't in keeping with my experiences with other suppliers, such as Palm.

I had several machines from Palm repaired over the years including a Pilot 5000, a Pilot III, a Treo 600 and a Treo 650. Palm always offered a program allowing me to pay a fee to have a refurbished machine sent to my office immediately. Then I would send the broken device back for repair. This, I thought was a reasonable approach that allowed the Palm customer to keep working while the machine was repaired.

HTC doesn't offer an enlightened repair/return program that's up to the level offered by Palm. I found that rather strange when I considered the target audience for this device. This leads me to believe that HTC really isn't prepared to deal with the public directly and that working with a mobile service provider might be better.

I've sent the machine to HTC. I've charged up my Treo 650 and have synchronized it and am back in business. I'll let you know more as the situation unfolds.