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Palm Pre user sues Palm, Sprint Nextel for data loss

Palm and Sprint Nextel are being sued by a Jason Standiford, a Palm Pre user, for allegedly causing him to lose the data on his phone.

The suit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose. Mr. Standiford claims he received a defective Palm Pre from a Sprint store and lost his contacts, memos and Internet bookmarks upon returning the device to the store even though Palm promises to store this data for a 24-hour period.

?[Mr. Standiford is] seeking relief for the loss of personal data suffered by himself and other users of Pal webOS-based wireless phone devices, including the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi,? the court filing says.

One of the differences between webOS and other mobile devices is webOS's reliance on synchronization with contacts, calendars and other information stored via the Internet using services like Google?s Gmail.

Rather than allowing webOS users to back up data stored directly on their devices to their PCs, webOS devices are designed to sync with a backup virtually all data directly to Palm?s own servers every 24 hours.

During each back-up, data stored during the previous 24-hour cycle is overwritten and rendered irretrievable. That means neither Palm nor Sprint retail backup data for more than 24-hours at a time.

On its Web site Palm states ?Back up your contacts, calendars, memos and tasks along with preferences and any software download from the App Catalog.

?Back up runs automatically every day over the air ? without interrupting you,? the site says. ?Then retrieve the information if you get a new Palm webOS phone by signing into your Palm profile.?

The Palm backup service begins to operate when a user creates a Palm profile.

?Neither Palm nor Sprint maintains secondary backup systems through which data backups older than 24 hours are stored,? the filing says.

?The result of this system is that many webOS device users suffered and continue to suffer significant and permanent data loss, including but not limited to the loss of instant messages, emails, calendar entries, address book contacts and applications paid for and downloaded from the Palm App Catalog,? it says.

WebOS users frequently experience data loss when switching from one webOS device to the next.

What further complicates webOS user data loss is that the Palm?s current webOS devices are not designed to sync locally with a user?s PC without additional software and hardware.

Palm Pre and Sprint suggest buying software from third-party vendors to users that want to backup data on their PCs. What?s worse is that Sprint stores can?t retrieve locally stored data from webOS devices.

?This means that Sprint is not able to transfer information from one webOS device to another for its customers,? the filing says.

In fact, it was a Sprint representative that attempted unsuccessfully to retrieve Mr. Standiford?s data from the defected phone he had returned, and in the process, deleted all of the data stored on the device.

?Defendants breached their contractual obligations, including their obligations of good faith and fair dealing, by failing to back up the data as promised,? the filing says.

The filing also accuses the defendants of negligence, violating the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act and violating the California Business & Professional Code.

?[The Plaintiffs ask that the court] award injunctive and equitable relief, including restitution in an amount to be decided at trial,? the filing says.