I love to rip on crappy companies as much as the next guy, but when a company does something RIGHT for a change, I don’t mind telling people about it. As you may know from reading thew0rd, Palm recently released a broken update (1.22) for the Treo 700w / 700wx series of phones. Palm then recalled the update a few days later screwing all of the early adopters, much like Apple has screwed early adopters of the iPhone by lowering the price. I have been battling with Verizon to replace my Treo 700w with the bad update, but the warehouse was out of phones with the old firmware. So I walked into the downtown Verizon flagship store and laid it out for the customer service guy.

The in-store customer service rep was clueless about the update being broken. He suggested I contact Palm, to which I replied “Palm says contact Verizon”. He stated that he would have known about it because Verizon sends notices to stores when problems arise. Well I showed him the message from Palm’s website stating that the updater was broken, and has been recalled. I also showed him the discussions over at treocentral regarding the broken update. I told him all I want is a replacement with the old firmware on it. He then went into the “back” for about 3 minutes, and came out with a refurbished Treo 700w with the 1.10 firmware. Perfect! He let me have it, and I was out of the store within a few minutes.

So if you are looking to get your phone replaced from the bad update find your local Verizon store (not a 3rd party store), and ask them to check their inventory for phones with the old update. Goodluck.