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Handspring Hides Flash ROM in Handspring Treo
miradu writes: "TreoCentral has just posted an intriguing article about how the Handspring Treo has Flash ROM - something that Handspring claims it doesn't. They've worked with Brayder Technology to create applications to utilize this newly discovered feature. It brings up the question, Why do developers lie about features in a device - especially if they are features that are wanted? Does anyone know any other examples?" Strange -- hardware manufacturers don't often underestimate their products' capabilities, do they?
It allows them to remove the Flash at some point in the future and replace it with a cheaper ROM. If they don't tell you that they have a Flash, then you won't complain when it is removed. I would expect the next version to be missing the Flash.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
This isn't _standard_ on all of the Treo's and is only used in certain manufacturing runs, so some of the things tried here could fail, or screw up the system you have. So in the specs they don't mention it as the use of FlashROM was down to a costing decision on a paticular run (maybe they bought in bulk to support other products, or had left over elements that could be incorporated).
This is like assuming that just because one PC has a paticular motherboard with paticular tweeks that every PC has that.
The Treo is still butt ugly mind.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Users of the Samsung i300 for the longest time were told that there was no flash rom, and that the operating sytem was not upgradable.
Then FlashPro came out and proved that there was flash in the i300.
Upgrading the OS is still not an option, considering that there are lots of propreitary extensions to the OS.
However, the flash capabilities of the devices were hidden for quite a while.
Jake
I think at least in Handspring's case, they've had a philosophy of planned obsolescense by building their products with hard ROMs.
Obviously, they can't be upgraded that way, so in their all knowing marketing minds, they're hoping users will continue to upgrade to newer products from Handspring.
Originally, they claimed that the lack of a flash ROM was a price saving measure, but I tend to think that in some cases, a flash rom would actually be cheaper.
Now that the treo has a flash rom, and they're lying about it, what do they expect? Of course users are going to make use of that 'hidden feature' now!
Handspring, you ought to 'embrace and extend' now that the gig's up.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
PhysicsGenius is absolutely right. See this research paper for more information on why they don't want you to know the facts.
It has been my experience at least that companies regularly hide things I would consider features because they don't want to deal with customer support issues surrounding those features. This more often happens, so it seems, when the feature involved is either complicated or delicate (or both for that matter).
Sometimes Hardware (or Software) manufacturers include features that are either experimental or transient and they don't mention them because they don't want to provide support for those features. If it something that the system uses, but application software shouldn't, then they probably won't mention it in the specs.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
On the original Rev.A iMac, Apple included what was known as a "mezzanine" slot. While Apple never used this slot for anything, some people did. I believe someone even rigged up a floppy drive into it. (This was before the HUGE boom in bondi blue USB peripherals)
Supernaut
Wow. I'm impressed. For the record, a photo-flash doesn't actually erase flash-ROMs. That's not what flash-ROM means...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Take a look at the cars with the 1.8 Turbo engine.
By changing the ECU programming, they can add power by adjusting boost pressure, air/fuel/spark maps...
The car can magically gain 10-20hp between model years, all with the click of a mouse.
Aftermarket ECU tuners can get the same results out of the cars that are just a few years older.
But, "15 more HP than last year" is a great selling point for a car.
Since when do we mod up retards?
Every time I see something like this, modded up as if it were fact, I want to cry. Go ahead, mod me down as troll or flamebait, but it's the goddammed truth. PhysicsGenius is anything but.
I believe that, in some trollish way, he refers to the old UV erasable EPROMs that are hardly ever used today. Hello, Brainiac, not only do those always have a sticker over the window to prevent accidental erasure, but they would be inside the case. That's right, aside from the stray 1 in 1 trillionth photon that tunnels through a quarter inch of plastic, any EPROMs would be safe.
If only it were an EPROM, that is. Flashrom is electrically erasable, no light of any wavelength is involved. Nothing short of long-term high dose gamma rays is likely to have any effect whatsoever.
Please, please, if you see this in m2, kick the ass of the moderator that gave this "interesting".
Personally though I've never seen the need to use the built-in flash RAM on my TRGpro, since I have a (*gloat*) 128MB CF card.
My favorite quote from the article:
I ask all these rhetorical questions for a reason: I want to know what you think.
er... you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
When the Visor first came out Handspring made a point about how they didn't use Flash ROM in the device and how that was a cost saving to the consumer (ie made the device lower priced). They made a big deal about it in their marketing materials.
Now, what happens when they reverse their position?
Strange -- hardware manufacturers don't often underestimate their products' capabilities, do they?
ALWAYS. Ever hear of overclocking?
And not just computer hardware, but pretty much anything built is tested PAST the point that it's good for.
If your car's guages tell you it redlines at 6500 rpm, it probably really redlines at 7000. If an elevator says "20 People Max" it really means 30 or 40. etc.
-... ---
Whats the chance they license Palm-OS on a reduced rate because it isn't 'upgradable'?
It's common for the aspirations of engineers to be lobotomized a little by the larger marketting beast. I've read several articles on the web where a Celeron motherboard could be greatly sped up by placing celophane tape over a single pin of the Celeron's card edge connector. But then we stray into the area of overclockers...
THE EARLIEST EXAMPLE that springs to mind is on Radio Shack's TRS-80 Color Computers. There was some story about doubling the RAM by bending two pins on a socketted IC chip. The story was that the onboard capacity was crippled for the sake of easy in-store upgrades.
Just so ya know.
There are memory chips that are reset by exposing them to light.
Taken from here.
An EPROM (erasable-and-programmable ROM) is programmed in exactly the same manner as a PROM. However, EPROMs can be erased and reprogrammed repeatedly. To erase an EPROM, you simply expose the device to a strong source of ultraviolet light. (A window in the top of the device allows the light to reach the silicon.) By doing this, you essentially reset the entire chip to its initial-unprogrammed-state. Though more expensive than PROMs, their ability to be reprogrammed makes EPROMs an essential part of the software development and testing process.
-... ---
There was a recent study by a German scientist Dr. Helmut Pottman proving that leaving your PDA in direct sunlight for just 10 minutes a day could erase your PDA's EPROM-chips in just a few weeks. The PDA could start acting erratically in a few days, but they usually lasted for at least two weeks. One way to protect the pda is to put a thin sheet of plastic over it. Helmut discovered this after accidentally placing a sandwich wrapper on top of his PDA.
You could also keep it under your tinfoil hat - that should protect it.
"Thin sheet of plastic" protects it? More so than the thick sheet of plastic that the case is composed of?
"Dr. Helmut Pottman?" Surely he's published his "recent study" on the web somewhere? Show me the link - German's ok, I can read that...
C'mon... You can troll better than this! (Though you might want to send your post to ZDNet - they might fall for it...)
-- My Weblog.
So tell me IF they hadn't got flash ROM's in them how the heck would the software upgrade to enable GPRS work then?
:-)
Answers on post card
Yes the Visors don't have flash ROM's but the treos have. That;s one of the nice things about them.
Happens all the time. CPU's are one extreme example. Early Intel celerons had the hidden capacity to be used in a multi processor setup. This was only changed when Intel noted that a lot of users where opting to buy two dirt cheap celerons rather then the overpriced PII(I) they wanted you to buy. Same with overclockin. It is easy enough to accomplish with an AMD chip, don't have Intel myself anymore so couldn't say, but AMD sure as hell ain't telling users about it. I started my IT career on the PROGRESS platform, RDMS and 4GL in one. Their monitoring tool had a "secret" section I only learned about when a rep visitid for some testing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The developers of the hardware usually aren't the ones who are lying. I work for a fairly large company and I can safely tell you that the engineers (that's me) don't sit around and plot to hide features. The way it usally goes down is that some guy in marketing gets a hold of technical documentation that is being developed along with the product. Once he gets it, he gives us a call and starts asking if feature so and so should really be documented. One thing is for certain though, marketing seems to get the final say as to what gets published and what doesn't.
The corperate benifit of some of this stuff is fairly easy to see. For instance, say we make a chip called the Wizbang 3900. Now, this chip is going to be released in the 3901, 3903 and 3909 flavors each with different features. Since a run through the fab can cost upwards of $500k, it is much easier to just make one version, then just label them differently. The same thing is true with the development boards. A lot of times the board is only populated with the parts to allow that feature set. By populating more/different parts of the board, different features can be achived with out requiring a different board spin. All of this saves money and development costs, but does lead to some documentation holes.
So in short, blame it not marketing not the engineers. We're the good guys.
I vaguely recall US Robotics doing something like this with their early Sportster modems a few years ago. IIRC, you could turn your $250 Sportster 14.4K into a $400 Courier Dual Standard (HST!) 16.8K by sending a command string that flipped a switch in the firmware and enabled the Courier code. I tried to find a page on it, but the best I was able to do was a few messages archived in Google groups.
Do hardware manufacturers understate the capabilties of their products? I guess the answer is "All the time, man. All the time."
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
First of all, it's not the developers who lie most likely, but that's just nitpicking. It's probably the marketing people.
But anyway, they probably lie for the same reasons that Microsoft disabled OS calls necessary for a bootloader to function.
***They don't want you to boot PalmOS, or WinCE, or whatever off the device and install something else.***
I'm not into MSoft bashing, but even I can't deny this one. They did it, plain and simple. And now it appears that Handspring may be using similar tactics.
I know it sucks for those of us who like to install alternative OS's on our PDAs, but on the other hand, I can also understand why it doesn't really fit into their business model.
Just think of it as Ford welding their cars' engines in place, so you couldn't easily swap the engine for a different one.
If you want to easily use an alternative OS on your PDA, here's the best options in no particular order, IMO:
Ipaq
Zaurus
Agenda VR-3
Old WinCE device and NetBSD
THere are probably others, but it's too early to think.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Well, maybe wrong is a little harsh. This is all opinion. I'd strongly say that the reason why though is that they don't want companies or people writing their own instructions on the ROM. After all, they strongly support PALM OS, and they wouldn't want to make it easier for people to migrate to other software.
Ummm and the ones produced next week will be the same, and every run was checked. They didn't find any exceptions to their theory, but again this doesn't meant that there are none. Have Handspring confirmed that FlashROM is standard... nope.
t ml or http://www.symbian.com/news/2001/nokia7650-feat.ht ml ?
And in terms of butt ugly, sure it beats Palm but does it beat... http://www.symbian.com/news/2002/soneric-p800-2.h
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
It's an easter egg!
[o]_O
If it's a copy protection workaround of course they lie. That's why they're called "devices".
When a product is designed, especially when the product is part of an evolving line of similar products, the product may contain bits of technology that are there to test various design points or manufacturing methods. While these are part of the product, if the features these technology pieces provide are not advertised, then the manufacturer has no duty to provide support for them.
Support is one of the most costly items in a products lifecycle. I remember a statistic (I can't quote the source) that 50% of the cost of software is in the support and maintainance of it after release. I would venture that Handspring has looked at what it would take to support this feature and decided that there is not enough margin in the product to support it even if the capability is provided in the hardware.
A final thought, they may have discovered some sort of performance or reliability problem with the flash ROM and instead of correcting the problem (potentially quite costly), they removed the feature so they did not have to support it.
-tpg.
Do you seriously thing that an automaker would advertise their engine as having only 140 hp if with a small software change they could get 160 hp? I mean come on.
No, they spec the engines out based on a number of factors relating to emissions, fuel economy and reliability. So by tweaking you adjust the compromise. Automakers do refine engines over time to gain more power, but they try do so in ways that don't effect it negatively. By that I mean, decreasing reliability or not allowing the car to meet US regulations regarding emissions and fuel economy.
>Do you seriously thing that an automaker would
>advertise their engine as having only 140 hp if
>with a small software change they could get 160
>hp? I mean come on.
Single brand (Porsche, BMW) companies usually don't - but those who have luxury brands and ordinary brands (Toyota, Honda, VW, Nissan, Ford, GM...) do. They want to share parts to reduce cost, but have to intentionally downtune the cheaper brands to prevent it from competing with its own luxury brands.
If users install applications into this flash space, Handspring can't upgrade or patch the OS using this flash space. Now the number of support calls quintuple, because users flashed applications into this space (violating their warantee, I might add).
I see nothing at all wrong with what they've done, and it happens all the time in electronics.
Very poor quality troll. For one thing, PDA's don't use EPROMs, they use mask-programmed roms, which are faster and cheaper. Furthermore, sunlight doesn't erase EPROMS at all. I've tried it. Of course, it could be because there's not that much strong sunlight in these latitudes...
Yes, they turn down the turbo boost because you're putting more wear and tear on the engine running it at a higher boost value. Less waranty repairs and a longer engine life are both valuble qualities to have in car not aimed at car enthusiasts.
Actually, the story I heard is that Intel made 486 chips. The ones that ended up with working coprocessors were sold as 486DX, and the ones with broken coprocessors had the links to this part of the circuit severed and were sold as 486SX.
I believe this is still going on with processor speed. They don't set out to make several different speeds of CPU, but rather make the CPU as best they can and sort them out by how fast they can be clocked after the fact.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
BMW claims their 2001-02 M-Roadster does 0-60 in 5.0 seconds. Mine does 0-60 in well under that (I don't have a good way to measure it precicely, but I've driven enough sports cars to have a good idea). The various auto mags that have run their own test place it between 4.5 and 4.75 secs. Why would BMW understate the performance so significantly? So that it doesn't cut into sales of the higher-priced M3 Convertable and the much higher-priced (and actually slower) Z-8....
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
I think at least in Handspring's case, they've had a philosophy of planned obsolescense by building their products with hard ROMs.
Obviously, they can't be upgraded that way, so in their all knowing marketing minds, they're hoping users will continue to upgrade to newer products from Handspring.
I disagree. Handspring has always had aggressive pricing: for what you get, the price has always been very good.
(And recently they have insane low prices on Visor products... probably because sales took such a big hit after Donna Dubinsky said Handspring would be exiting the organizer market. People don't want to buy an orphan product, so Handspring slashed prices to keep sales moving. Ironically, the Treo 90 makes it clear that Handspring has not, after all, decided to exit the organizer market! But Visor devices with Springboard slots are never going to see any new models.)
I used to work for a manufacturing company. They were obsessed with Cost Of Goods. If a flash chip really costs $5 extra, it would totally make sense for Handspring to want to get rid of it. $5 additional cost of goods is probably worth $15 on the retail price; they can abosorb that now but down the road that's a lot.
I paid $300 for my first Visor Deluxe. You can now get one new for $120.
And, all that said, how many Handspring customers really care? I've never bothered to install an OS update on my Visor Deluxe; I haven't had any problems with it, so who needs it? Once the OS is stable, having it in ROM won't bother very many people.
I, personally, would cheerfully pay $20 or more for a flash chip on my PDA. However, I'm a geek, and most people wouldn't choose to pay that much. And it would cost too much to produce two versions of each PDA (the flash version and the cheaper ROM version) and let customers choose.
I wish they could put the ROM in a socket or something so it would be easy to swap in a flash chip. Alas that isn't going to happen on a tiny PDA device, even if it didn't add to cost and make the device potentially less reliable.
I don't have a problem with what Handspring has done. But I might try to buy one of the "early" model Handsprings now that I know about this.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I've noticed from time to time a "feature" is burried and said to not exist becouse it's not supported in the typical way.
PalmOs provides some support for flash rom and no doupt the Handspring units lack that support.
There are some good reasons for not announcing this fact.
I've noticed on my Handspring Visor while I have 2 meg memory it's actually 2 meg total memory.. including the rom. This could be Handspring goofing around and giving less ram to cut costs. But I doupt they could easly do that.
More likely the rom was copied to ram. This is a trick to speed things up a tad done on some PCs.
If Handspring dose this will ALL the devices they sell then the flashrom would automaticly be cut off when it wasn't needed anymore.
It makes sense to me. Handspring provides software updates from defects in PalmOs on older visors. Yet they don't have flash. This suggests to me that the patch is being done in ram and not to the rom itself.
This also suggests that if you hard reset the unit your patch is vaperised. A good thing when you think about it... Viruses? Yeah you remember those. Palm isn't evil like Microsoft but they aren't totally benine. Just as evil as Kelloggs.. (Or do you believe coco puffs are actually a healthy breakfast? I don't.. Never did.. not even as a kid.. Good to expose kids to obveous marketting lies)
So basicly yeah it may be there but just not supported enough to tell the costummer.
The'd expect it to be supported in the usual ways and when it's not they'd be pritty angry.
I don't actually exist.