OQO's massive QC failure and apology

oqo.png

Fortunately and unfortunately us tech journos get pretty good technical support. We make a call to someone in company PR, they come and help us, and we rarely go through the hoops normal consumers face when they have a bum PC or printer (incidentally, I’m happy to escalate problems with products to the proper folks for CG readers. I’ve done it before on WWR for people who had broken watches and we’re happy to do it here at CG as well). Well, one of our own finally felt the pain of being “just some guy with a problem” and the story wasn’t pretty.

OQO makes little UMPCs. Dave Ciccone’s OQO 2 wouldn’t hold a charge so he called support and they told him to send it back. Two weeks later he got the unit back in worse shape than he sent it and called to complain. They asked him for a credit card number to hold a “deposit” and swap out the unit for a new one — most companies just ship you a new unit and give you a label to return the old one expecting, rightly, that you don’t want a piece of crap bum unit and a new unit cluttering up the place — and Dave refused. Finally, they relented and sent the new unit and it didn’t have a battery. Bloops.

Dave updated his post with a little of the old “communications breakdown” line, but I don’t believe it. If Dave had this problem, I’m sure a number of others have had the same problem. OQO needs to rework its returns policy and teach its customer service reps that there are actually human beings at the other end of the line who, policy or not, purchased their products in good faith.

UPDATED..OQO quality control problems – Resolved [MobilityToday]