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Filesystem Problems with the Treo 650s
Kaisa Tarasov writes "It turns out PalmOne's new Treo 650
is shipping with a major problem that's causing first adopter users and
developers to cancel
their orders in droves. The new Treo, along with the Tungsten T5,
utilizes a new FAT based
nonvolatile file system. Not only is the new system much slower, as
the data has to be loaded into a SDRAM chip before running, but in this
filesystem PalmOne switched from using directly addressable storage, to
storage addressed
in 512 Byte blocks. This has caused many files to swell in size - up
to 500% in some cases (such as the address book). Users,
already flustered with the small 23 MB of available memory, when trying
to sync their old data onto the new device are discovering that their
old data does not fit on the new Treo. What does PalmOne do?"
I think this new item is a bit too negative. I just upgraded from a 600 to a 650 and I think it's a great product. I didn't even know about any of the filesystem "issues" before reading this news. While, I guess this may be an issue for some users, I have not had any problems myself. Also to note:
:)
- the 650 loads programs at least 3 times faster than the 600 from my experience (likely due to the faster processor, but still!)
- the 650 has 4X the resolution of the 600. It can be argued that the 600 should have had 320x320 to begin withy, but either way, it's worth the upgrade by itself.
- Also, one of the benefits of the new memory is that you don't loose data when you loose power completely. Making the removeable battery system feasible.
- Finally, it's the first sprint phone (to my knowledge) to have bluetooth. I love my jabra
Well, just my $.02, I thought palmOne was getting a little too harsh of a rap, the 650 is a very good product in my opinion.
Given this scare with the 650, I did a search on eBay to see if people are unloading their treos. What I found was a lot of listings for people selling COUPONS to get the Treo 650 at a discounted price of $349. I noticed that some people were obviously mistaken and bidding upwards of $300 for this coupon, rather than the actual device. Does anyone have any information on this coupon?
I don't know, I've owned one Windows CE device and two Palm OS devices, and I have to say I much prefer the Palm OS devices. Longer batter life, clean simple interface, easy to use and understand.
No matter where you go... there you are.
Each piece of contact data is not in a seperate file, they are each a seperate record in a database. In the past, each database record took up (size of record+8) bytes. It looks as if that it is now (size of record+8) and round up to nearest multiple of 512 bytes.
All the current applications for PalmOS use the database way of accessing files. So there's no real workaround for it, except rewriting applications to combine records into one and use their own database access wrapper.
This will affect the program I develop for Palm OS too, as it stores small (~100byte) macros in seperate records of a database.
If you read the threads, this isn't something that is going to affect most users. This guy is trying to put 22,000 contacts on his phone. It is taking up over 11 MB. Not good but we are talking an edge case here. I can't believe that this is a normal usage pattern for a phone!
I have about 100 contacts on my phone and I don't know who many of them are. They were added during business meetings or various introductions. How can anyone keep track of 22,000 contacts?
The supposed problem with the Treo 650 seems to be completely overblown from what I can see.
as an owner of the Treo 650 for a few months now (yes, i got it early) - it is definately the best phone/pda combination that exists; it gives users everything that the Treo 600 users have always been asking for.
as for this being a problem, its not.
palmone can get an update out for this to use the memory layout for its file system much more efficiently and then users can run a simple rom updater application (direct from SD card) to get the latest rom image flashed to the device.
if the device had mask rom, it would be an issue. but, i've been updating my treo 650 every week with new rom images. its a small issue, the developers should fix it quite quickly and then its just a matter of getting the flashable SD card image out to normal users to fix the problem.
Or go back to the PalmOS 5 way of storing data.
I prefer the Palm database model to the desktop file model for use on handhelds, as it fits in nicely with how the majority of handheld applications want to work.
As someone who's used Palm and PocketPC devices (and developed my own programs for both) I definitely preferred the Palm approach. Which is why my Tungsten C gets carried around and my HP Jornada is at the bottom of a box somewhere.
Of course the main reason is that my jornada used to crash a couple of times a day, whereas my Tungsten C has crashed a couple of times (both when an 802.11 connection got dropped by a faulty access point).
Phil
I guess today is a passable day to die.