Poor iPAQ. I dropped it yesterday in a moment of spasticity; now the buttons don’t quite work properly. I mean, they work well enough, but they don’t work the way they’re supposed to.

There are four app-launching buttons that I never use, so their not working bothers me none. However I do use the page wheel button (left, down, right, up) all the time for reading, and now up and down don’t work. I have to use left for up and right for down.

Actually, none of them worked at all until I turned the device off and sorta bent the thing a little. There are dents on it and everything.

Having carried many PDAs over the years, I’ve dropped a lot of them. All of my palm tops have had dents and scratches in them. I guess I’m just lucky that I’ve never actually damaged the functionality of any of them before.

And like I said, this one still works well enough; the screen’s totally undamaged and I can use the action button on the side to page with if I need to.

I used HP’s online live chat thing, and the tech suggested I try a hard reset. Which I won’t; it’s clearly a hardware problem when simply twisting the device a tiny bit invokes all of the lower buttons at once and boots all the apps associated with them!