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February 10 Treo 650 with FAT32 support!Well it's been a while since my last blog entry. I've been busy so I didn't even have time to report on the firmware version 1.71FW-1.20SW that came out a couple of months ago. It's the first Treo 650 firmware that successfully addresses DBCache management issues introduced with NVFS. Now the Treo 650 can release DBCache when it's about to be filled up. Bluetooth support is also more reliable than previous versions. All in all, 1.71/1.20 is a version that I could finally install onto my colleagues' Treos and forget about it. Unless someone gets really experimental and installs tons of unstable 3rd party programs, a Treo 650 running 1.71/1.20 should just be running fine for weeks without any random resets or the need to reset it manually to free up DBCache.
A few days ago, the mighty Shadowmite, Treo hacker extraordinaire, released a FAT32 support file that he got out from the ROM of a pre-production Treo 700p. After replacing the original FATFS.prc with this one in the ROM and re-flashing the firmware, voila! The Treo 650 can now support SD cards larger than 2GB! Even better yet, Palm has obviously done a great job rewriting the file system codes and as a result reading/writing of my existing FAT16 card is now distinctively faster than before. Since I rely on programs like Quick News and AvantGo which store their data on SD cards, this new FAT32 "hack" is such a welcome update. Great job Shadowmite, we Treo fans owe you big time! :)
More next time! October 24 Treo 650 1.43/1.14 firmware is a winnerI had been extremely happy with my Treo 650 running the combination of 1.31/1.13 firmware and VolumeCare. The system is rock solid, never resets by itself and earpiece volume is loud enough to be heard on a noisy street. During the October 1 holidays I came across a new "debug" version of Treo 650 firmware with the version number of 1.43/1.14dbg. The "dbg" obviously stands for debug here. I flashed this and immediately noticed that the PalmOS version has been updated to 5.4.8 from 5.4.7. The most visible improvements are the speedy launch of the phone application and increased earpiece volume. Now I don't need to enable the earpiece boost in VolumeCare any more. I still have VolumeCare enabled for adjusting the microphone volume for now but it's good to see that Palm finally address the lack of earpiece volume via their own firmware update. Bluetooth headset usage seems to be a bit more smooth than before although I haven't used it often enough to be sure. With every major firmware revision Palm seem to be able to make the already great Treo 650 a step closer to perfection. I know there's no "perfect" thing in the world but I've yet to see another smartphone that can compete head to head with the Treo 650 in areas of form factor and ease of use in everyday use. The QWERTY keypad is something that I cannot live with now and I will be looking for one in any future purchase. But for now, I am happy with my Treo 650 as it is. :) If you don't feel comfortable running "debug" firmware you might want to wait for the official release from Palm but trust me, it's worth the effort. April 25 New Treo 650 firmware fixes NVFS inefficiencyOver the weekend there was a newly leaked firmware version (1.21) for the Treo 650 that are supposed to address the infamous inefficiency use of RAM introduced with the new NVFS non-volatile flash memory system featured in the Tungsten T5 and the Treo 650. Even though it's still not an official release, I couldn't wait to give it a try. Oh boy does it work well! Even without putting apps in the ROM now I have 12MB of free RAM. One of the database that used to take up over 5MB now only shows up as less than 1MB! I don't know why engineers at PalmOne made the mistake with NVFS in the first place but this finally is what NVFS is supposed to be: a usable memory system that perserves your data even when your Treo runs out of power.
I hope PalmOne releases an official version soon so I can create another custom ROM based on it and free up more RAM. Although at this point I am not complaining. Official or not, this 1.21 version works great! April 07 Treo 650 Custom ROMThanks to ROM tools written by Shadowmite and a leaked GSM Treo 650 firmware update package to work on, I was able to make a custom ROM for my beloved Treo 650. After getting rid of unnecessary ROM modules and adding many programs to the ROM, now I have 11MB of free RAM available for my Treo. Nice! P.S. I have posted instructions about making custom ROM for the Treo 650 to the local Hi-PDA.com forum and have since seen several cases in which inexperienced Treo owners failed to follow the exact steps in flashing their devices, resulting in completely useless Treos. This is not what I had intended but I did warn them. Oh well. |
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