Here's the entire article - it's not as slanted as what is suggested by the quote above
PDAs
There's a clear consensus in our survey of handheld owners: Respondents with PDAs that run the Palm operating system had a better time than those running PocketPC-based PDAs. The three companies at the top of the reliability class, Handspring, Palm, and Sony, all use the Palm OS. Meanwhile, companies including HP, Dell, and Toshiba--all of whose PDAs run the PocketPC operating system--lag behind this group. Like owners of other peripherals covered in this survey, handheld owners weren't rushing to their PDA's manufacturers for help. Indeed, they usually didn't need it, thanks to sturdy hardware.
Nevertheless, Dell customers reported a higher percentage of problems when they first started using their devices than owners of other PDAs, along with a higher number of problems per year. Dell's Axim product line is young, however--less than a year old at the time of our survey--and some users' initial problems were due to syncing-software snags.
"The majority of PDA problems out of the box are software-related," says IDC's Randy Giusto. "Synchronization is usually one of the top problems for users." The good news? Syncing software is not rocket science. "Syncing generally improves with every revision of the sync software," Giusto says.
Despite Dell's setbacks, a whopping 82 percent of respondents claimed high overall satisfaction with the reliability of the vendor's PDAs, putting Dell at the top in this category.
When troubles do arise, according to our survey results, Compaq, Handspring, and Palm (the only PDA manufacturers that drew enough responses to permit us to calculate a service score) leave customers satisfied with the resolution of their problems.
Kathleen Fuller, a human resources manager at an investment firm in Minneapolis, ran into a stubborn syncing problem with her Handspring Visor Edge handheld when it first arrived two years ago. After looking around the company's Web site for answers without success, she submitted a query to the site electronically. Within a day or two, "tech support e-mailed me some steps to take, and I had no trouble after that," she recalls. Since then, Fuller has submitted a handful of questions about her PDA's features electronically, and she has always received a quick response.
PDA users say that Handspring provides the fullest online support, but it's clear that all companies could do better. Palm is already looking at ways to improve its site. It recently analyzed users' search terms and rewrote the site's language to generate more-accurate search results more quickly, reports Dan Gilbert, Palm's senior director of global customer service and logistics. Of course, Palm and Handspring owners are watching to see how the upcoming merger of the two PDA giants affects service. Gilbert says that the combined company will employ separate sets of experts to support the different product lines.