By Henry Climary
October 9, 2004
I'm between PDAs, which makes writing a column on them more of a challenge than usual. So this month I'll talk about what can happen when you sell a PDA.
If, like me, you like your gadgets to be fresh and relatively new, selling a handheld while it's still reasonably current can be a good way to finance your habit--or at least, keep your tech budget from becoming ruinous.
I'd heard of this strategy (selling cameras and other tech toys when they are only a year old to help finance the purchase of a brand-new model) from others, but I'd never tried it myself until a couple of weeks ago. That's when, anticipating that I'd want to spring for one of the new crop of preholiday handhelds, I put my beloved PalmOne Treo 600 for sale on EBay. It was an amazing experience.
To educate myself on the market for PalmOne's popular PDA-cell phone hybrid, I checked out the EBay listings for other Treos. Many touted brand-new phones, but most of those were GSM devices. My Treo 600 was a Sprint model, and listings for those were less plentiful, so it was difficult to estimate what my phone would bring in.
Also, my Treo wasn't new--it had put in a good 10, nearly 11 months of faithful service. It still worked well, and cosmetically it was in darn good shape, but I didn't see anything listed that looked that old. Plus, I couldn't find the earbud headset or the canvas case that came with it. I couldn't find the CD with the desktop software either, but I was able to download the software from PalmOne's Web site and burn it onto a CD.
Last-Minute Rush
Anyway, I decided to list the item with a starting bid of $10 and a reserve of $150. Sprint is still selling the Treo 600 for $600, but the final price can drop to $420 if you qualify for various rebates. Given the age of my unit and the missing accessories, I figured I'd be lucky to get $250.
And up until the very end of the auction, that's what it looked like I'd be getting. But in the final moments, some weird EBay bidding frenzy seemed to take hold of a few would-be buyers. I had a little warning--the last day, several people posted queries, including requests for a photo of the phone. Still, I was shocked when the dust cleared and the final selling price was $370.
I discussed this with a colleague and frequent EBay patron who wasn't nearly as surprised as I was. Apparently tech gadgets of fairly recent vintage can do very well on EBay.
The whole transaction proved to be one of those rare win-win situations. My buyer, a fellow in Arizona, seemed pleased with his purchase; he e-mailed me to say he'd activated the phone and it was working well. Maybe he wouldn't have qualified for rebates, and the $370 (plus $10 shipping/handling) seemed like a deal to him.
Meanwhile, I have the wherewithal for a decent subsidy on my next purchase. Stay tuned.
Scrambling for Substitutes
The only problem is, I'm not quite ready to buy yet. And selling the Treo left me without mobile phone or PDA.
I filled in the phone gap fairly quickly, at least temporarily: I had agreed to test Research In Motion's new BlackBerry 7100T phone, and was happy to hang on to it as long as I could after writing my review.
I missed having a real PDA, though, and for a day or two it didn't seem like I'd be getting one anytime soon. But then, while cleaning up my office, I encountered a Palm loaner I'd received months earlier and never checked out: a TapWave Zodiac. The Zodiac, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure, is a Palm OS-based gaming handheld, complete with joystick and high-end graphics.
I figured I might as well take a closer look; after all, as the PDA Pundit I'm supposed to be on top of these things. So I installed the desktop software and synced to my old Treo backup file.
The Zodiac is a bit oversized for my taste, but otherwise it's a well-appointed handheld that lets me run my Palm apps and play a little game now and then. Is it a Gameboy killer? I doubt it; I just don't think the game development community wants to add the Palm OS to the lengthy list of platforms it already has to support.
But the Zodiac may not have to be my backup Palm device for long. PalmOne has just announced its latest Tungsten, the T5. I'm looking forward to checking it out. A part of me still misses the Treo 600--it was a faithful and reliable companion--but it seems to have found a happy home, and it's time for me to move on.
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