LOS ANGELES-A group of Treo smart-phone users filed a class-action lawsuit against Treo maker Palm Inc. for making “inherently defective” devices. The suit, filed in a California court, requests a jury trial and seeks damages for all of the estimated 1.7 million Treo 600 and 650 users.
The lawsuit alleges Palm knows the devices are defective but continues to sell them. A Palm official was not immediately available to comment on the suit.
“These phones suffered from extremely poor sound quality and buzzing, choppiness, speakerphone problems, poor and broken screens, phone crashes, software crashes and electrical surges,” the suit alleged. “When Palm replaced phones in response to these problems they replicated the problems by providing consumers refurbished phones subject to identical issues.
“Palm is and has been aware of the scope of the problems with the Treo 600 and 650, but has failed to take substantial corrective action.”
Carriers including Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp. and Cingular Wireless L.L.C. currently sell Palm’s Treo devices, which feature the Palm operating system and a tiny keyboard. When it was first released, the device was widely praised.
This is not the first lawsuit filed by phone users. Earlier this year, a group of Motorola Inc. V710 users sued the phone maker and Verizon over limitations on the phone’s Bluetooth technology.
