investwisely

Please read attached link and comment. I am an engineer and it makes sense that this is possible.
http://mytreo.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB....num=1100743887

4spammers

Yeah. Just saw that myself. I'm a Palm developer. It's not great news...but probably the price of having non-volatile memory combined with support for multiple versions of the os (duplicating data). Even a small increase in the available memory for the Treo 650 would have been nice. Oh well. Nothing we can do about it now. It's not the end of the world.

At least there's a SD slot for memory expansion. And the increase in memory used should be modest for most programs -- i.e., worst for those that store small bits of data in many records...but programs like that are painful anyway, 'cause the increased number of records slows down HotSync significantly.

Besides, if the Treo 650 were perfect, then what would be left to fix for the Treo 700?

euroclie

Definitely not the end of the world, and not a bad enough news to quench everyone's lust to upgrade, but I'm sure that this will soon raise critics from frustrated (power) users who have already filled the Treo 600 RAM to the max with programs and data, and who'll discover that they'll have to put part of their stuff on the memory card because all that could fit in the Treo 600 RAM might not fit in the 650 memory!

At least, it'll give those who can't upgrade a good reason to convince themselves that they're better patiently waiting for a Treo 700 with more memory!

Gasmeister

Flash Bulletin!!


Palm acknowledges Treo 700 coming out soon! Thousands line up to torture themselves awaiting its release! Treo 650 accessories will not fit the Treo 700. Sprint taking orders; expected to ship "any day now."

OnePalm

Now that really is crappy. Given this architecture change they really should have included more memory. Why they chose 512 bytes as their sector size is puzzling. With a small device like this you would think 128 or 256 would have been way more applicable. Maybe there will be an option to configure it like there is for harddisk formatting. The good news is Samsung recently double the memory in a single nand-flash chip so the next Treo will hopefully be able to resolve the issue without a huge impact on battery life. Clearly the 650 adds a lot, but not without taking way somethings. Their move to flash memory (which conceptually is very important) seems to suffer from a pretty poor design. It does not look like they have the right people in the design and/or the implementation. They have been way more clever in the past.

fushigi

I don't really have a problem with a 512 byte sector. What seems to be the larger issue is the 512 byte minimum data allocation. That's what will kill memory usage. For programs, rounding up to the next 512 byte allotment won't waste enough RAM to notice. However, for data, allocating 512 bytes per record or worse, per field, will really hurt. Most modern OSes do memory allocation at the word level:2, 4, 8, or maybe even 16 bytes at a time. Multiple data segments can be stored in a single sector. There's no reason why PalmOS shouldn't follow this same guideline.

__________________
- Fushigi

bmacfarland

I'm sure Palm applications will do that in the future if they haven't in the past.

As for the contacts datbase taking up a lot more space, I would think it would be an example where they could use up all of the 512 chunk, throwing in more than one contact if necessary, so I wouldn't have expected this jump too much.

This is terrible news as I'm already up against the limit. The only thing that can save this is the ability to run off a SD card fairly transparently. I'll suffer the loss of 10MB of storage on the handheld to gain seemless use of 1GB on the card.

bestoverall

Does anyone know if Jackflash can relieve memory limitation? On my T3, I currently able to get over 600K extra memory from Flash, but not sure if this is even possible with the new memory architecture on 650.

bmacfarland

There's a thread here speculating (with very, very sound logic behind it) that applications will take up more memory on the Treo 650 than on the Treo 600.

I was wondering if you could share your experiences regarding this as you upgrade. For instance if you were almost full before the upgrade, did you find that you were completely full afterward?

Here's the thread I'm referring to:

650 uses more memory than 600

jayzee

I restored the data from my 600 with backupman. All of the files on my 650 are larger than the 600. For example SpMn-Checking is 132k on the 600 it is 859k on the 650, I searched palm support couldn't find an answer for this. Does anyone know why this is?

whmurray

We're all effed?

Gaurav

Refer to this thread over at MTDN:

http://mytreo.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB....43887;start=15

Also, here's a good tutorial about the Treo 650's/T5 NVFS memory architecture:

http://www.red-mercury.com/nvfs.html

According to Pocketscience over at MTDN:

__________________
_________________
aka Gfunkmagic

Current device: Palm Pre
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Device graveyard: Palm Vx, Cassiopeia E100, LG Phenom HPC, Palm M515, Treo 300, Treo 600, Treo 650, Treo 700p, Axim X50v, Treo 800w
Moderator,
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.


Please don't PM me about my avatar. For more info go
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
.
Restore your Pre to factory settings using
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
and follow these
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

whmurray

So the net is that instead of having the samc amount of memory on the 650 that we have on the 600, we have dramatically less. Welcome to P1.

jayzee

I wish I would of paid more attention to the articles on the new memory. I never would of got a 650. Not to mention the software that is incompatible but there is no room. On my 600 I have 4mb left. I only backed up the 650 to about the N's or O's and it is full. So by my estimation it holds about 40 percent of the 600. This is bad palmone, no wonder you made the t5 with 256mb of ram it needs it but so does the treo.

BD1

This does not look good. Can you list all of your aps so we can get an idea of how much you are trying to load?

jayzee

THere are too many apps to list. I was trying to load about 19mbs of apps from my 600 on to the 650. I got about 9mb transferred but on the 650 it showed up as 21mb. To give you an idea pocket tunes on the 600 = 482k on the 650 = 681k. Where it it seems to be the worse is where many of small records are written to a pdb file such as an addressdb. Programdb from secondscreentv is 334k on the 600 on the 650 it is 1334k. Big difference it is no good. WOnder if there are companies that would do a memory upgrade in the 650?

wcarlson40

This is NOT good. I am definately not buying, I'm running low on memory on my 600 already (and yes, I have everything that can run from the memory card on the card....)

Beryl

Ditto. I have 6MB left but about 260MB of programs and files on my SD card and using PowerRun. The Treo 600 will be in use for some time to come.

jimf

This is a Bad Thing.

If you're in the mood to be incredibly forgiving to palmOne, you could claim that they upgraded their internal filesystem, and the memory delta is an issue with apps that haven't been reworked to account for the new segment sizes, etc.

But palmOne must know about this issue (and if they don't, they should be ashamed for competence reasons). If they're expecting every software vendor for palmOS to invest in a release to fix this, they have an unreasonable sense of their weight in the market. And to also keep the 650 at 32Mb rather than doubling or even tripling it - yikes.

Hopefully we'll hear something from palmOne about this. palmOne needs to quickly address this, and the best way to make that happen is to make this as public as possible. Anyone have Walt Mossberg's email address?

RobM

Sometimes it pays not to be an early adopter

rob