Are PDAs designed to fail? Or at least are their tenuous USB connections intentionally engineered to decrease the life expectancy of the unit itself? That's what one reader, following up on our discussion of what unopenable blister packs reveal about industrial design, was led to wonder about an all too easily broken HP iPaq 5550.
The reader wrote:
"My gripe concerns PDAs and their pathetically fragile connection to a PC -- a thin extension of the system board. Every PDA that I've seen has a modified USB port with a configuration that's always a narrow slot with a thin flange possessing metal contacts in the center, or slightly off center, and lots of things to bump, abrade, or suffer torsional forces. These things use USB to communicate, so why the special connector? Especially, why a fragile connector that's an extension of the system board rather than a replaceable plug?"
"So why this gripe? I had a perfectly functional two-year-old iPaq 5550 that simply 'lost' it's ability to sync. Sadly, this makes it basically useless, since the system is out of warranty. Cost to repair $400 CDN, cost to replace $400CDN."
"Seems to me that a user replaceable $0.50 part would have saved my unit and added only $5 to its purchase price. I wonder how often this happens? If Nintendo can make a connector that can survive the 10 years of abuse that those on our now ancient, but much beloved, Super Nintendo have endured, why the problem with PDAs? This is why it peeves me that the sync connector is a fail point of any PDA, being that it is one of the three most used parts of any PDA with the screen and pen holder being the other two."
6:05:11 PM 
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