Seems Motorola isn't the only hardware manufacturer seeing battery-related snafus of late. Users of the new Palm Centro smartphone have been experiencing horrendous battery life, with it draining in as little as 1 to 3 hours. Blame a password-related email application glitch.Having troubles out of the gate is never a good thing for a brand new piece of hardware. As it turns out, the new Palm Centro is causing user dismay in the form of really, *really* bad battery life. We're talking just several hours. That's like the battery life of a typical 1988 phone, not a 2007 phone.

According to Sprint's support page, this is the reason:

The cause of this issue is linked to the Sprint Mobile Email software ("client") and email synchronization issues that only occur when a customer's password is set incorrectly or the ISP email server is unavailable. Customers who experience the email synchronization issue on Sprint Mobile Email will notice that their Palm Cento battery will drain within 1-3 hours regardless of usage patterns because of to a continuous synchronization loop. This unnecessarily keeps the device active and drains the battery until the application is removed. This problem does not occur when email synchronization successfully completes.

Sprint and its email technology partner, Seven, worked out a software patch to fix the problem. It is available if you follow this link. Sprint briefly recommended that users experiencing this problem uninstall the Seven email application and use Palm's VersaMail program instead.

When it comes to cars, it's generally not advised to be the first to buy brand news models. The logic being that the manufacturer likely hasn't worked out all the bugs in the manufacturing process and the first cars to roll off the assembly line may experience more problems compared to those manufactured later. The same wisdom is often applied to the process of buying new computers, especially from Apple.

There is no such conventional wisdom for cell phones. Users often run out to the stores as soon as phones become available. Maybe this, combined the with battery contact problem experienced by the Motorola Sidekick Slide, should give people pause when considering the newest models.