Enthusiast Hacks WiFi Into Treo 650

Sammy at PalmAddict writes "Shadowmite, a Palm enthusiast has managed to hack his Palm One Treo 650 smartphone, enabling it to work with the Palm One WiFi card, despite Palm admitting the Treo was never designed to use WiFi technology. Shadowmite managed to get his hands on the Pa1m One WiFi card and modify it so that his Treo 650 could use it. The experiment was a success, and is causing quite a stir -- putting pressure on Palm One to provide support and fully support the new drivers."

Comments

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the article - it's not at all that the device wasn't intended to work on the Treo, it was purposefully not supported, even though supporting it was an extremely simple matter.

The article explains it clearly. This isn't really that clever of him, but he's just the first person to do it. The SIDO Wifi card fits into the Treo, just like other Palm products, and it only makes sense that it should work. The software was just lacking. That's all there is to it.

You can just hear the board meeting in your head at Verizon/Other Cell Provider with the Palm Treo Sales guy:

Palm: And not only that... but this thing is practically a mini computer! It's got Bluetooth, and file-transfer, and wifi...
Verizon: Wait. stop right there. What was that last thing you said?
Palm: Wifi. it's awesome, you can just be a part of any nearby network.
Verizon: Isn't that exactly what VoIP handsets do? Those things we don't own, and can't charge for?
Pam: ...
Verizon: Take that out.

Greedy Carriers

[blowhole]

It seems to me that the common thread in mobile device deficiencies is not the hardware or software companies, but rather the cell phone carriers. They are the perennial pessimists when it comes to new technologies, myopic in their fears that a handful of geeks will bring their business crashing down. Instead of embracing and developing them into new and exciting money-making, experience-enriching features, they castrate their own products solely in order to frustrate users. Swap castrate and frustrate freely in the previous sentence.

Imagine 10 years ago if a cell phone carrier told Motorola that their new cell phones were "way too small, anyone could just carry this around in their pocket. What will happen to our public telephone branch?! We have too much invested in the current infrastructure!"

Re:Greedy Carriers

[blamanj]

It's not to frustrate users, it's to gouge users. Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens all the time.

For instance, I worked at Intel in the early 80s. Intel invested a lot in development tools, compilers, assemblers, etc. It was the de facto leader in the technology. They sold their tools on their own platform, for which they charged about $25K.

When the IBM PC came out, all the software geeks said, "Hey, let's port this great software to the IBM PC, and think of all the developers we'll get." Intel management said, wait, if we do that we'll only make a couple hundred a shot for a compiler rather than $25K a shot for a development system. No way.

End result, Borland and others (and eventually Microsoft) introduced software that ran on the IBM PC and development system sales crashed anyway. Not only that, but now no one even bought Intel's software.

Moral: You can buy some short-term profit, but screwing your customers is a bad strategy long-term.

Re:Although it could be argued they should do this

[GrouchoMarx]

This was a clever hack but I'm sure Palm sells stuff with WiFi for a little more than the Treo 650 goes for.

OK, so you don't know what you're talking about. palmOne (there is no such company as "Palm" anymore, hasn't been for a year) sells exactly ONE model with integrated Wi-Fi, the Tungsten C. They also support Wi-Fi on 3 other models via their Wi-Fi SD card, which is an imperfect solution. (It takes up the card slot.) The Treo 650 price varies with the carrier, but is typically in the $500-$600 rage or up. It's NOT a cheap product.

Meanwhile, most new Dell PPCs and HP PPCs come with Wi-Fi now, and the PPC world is now being inundated with variants on the BlueAngel/Harrier design: Bluetooth, GSM/GPRS, AND Wi-Fi. All three wireless types in one fairly nice handheld. (Still uses Windows Mobile, which bites, and it's not against-the-face-friendly, but it's still a good device.)

Your point about "don't buy cheap and then complain" is valid, but has nothing to do with this issue. The Treo 650 is NOT cheap, it's a top-shelf product. Other products in similar price ranges all have Wi-Fi. You're NOT getting what you paid for here, that's what people are upset about.

(That said, I still want to get a GSM/EDGE Treo 650 when it comes out. The lack of Wi-Fi is just annoyingly stupid.)

Depends on your viewpoint...

[Svartalf]

The ONLY reason why it's not supported is the Telcos don't want you using it- partly because of VoIP capabilities and partly due to the fact that they want you using their expensive data service instead of a potentially cheaper/faster WiFi hotspot.

In this context, they should own up the lie and, at the minimum, come clean on it. This is the same sort of crap about crippled Bluetooth on some Moto models except worse, they came up with a lame-ass lie to cover for the real reasons. In all honesty, they should eat the pain from the Telcos and the Telcos should be revealed for what they are over all of this.