One of the reasons you haven’t seen many new articles on Operation Gadget in the past week is that I’ve been trying to identify an annoying problem with my Treo 650 that began after I upgraded it using the Cingular 1.17 Firmware Update. I had trouble upgrading my Treo by following the instructions provided by Cingular, so I only performed the Cingular 1.17 firmware update on my Treo and didn’t do it to my wife’s.
A couple of days after I ran the update on my Treo I experienced a White Screen of Death (known on many Treo-related discussion forums as a WSOD). This was the first such error that I ever experienced with this handset. My initial thought was that the problem had two potential causes:
- inheirent instability of the 1.17 firmware
- interaction problems between Chatter E-mail (my Treo email client) and the 1.17 firmware
I spent several days going through support and issue forums related to the Treo and to Chatter and concluded that I needed to rebuild my Treo application stack, from the core applications on up, and look for a third-party application or applications that were behaving badly. I did this four different times, and found nothing conclusive. The thing that pointed me back to Chatter was that the phone didn’t crash or have a WSOD for hours when Chatter wasn’t running.
I worked closely with Marc Blank, the author of Chatter Email, over a period of several days. I sent him a number of logs from the Chatter application after crashes or WSODs occurred and asked for his interpretation. He hasn’t found any indication that the instability I’m experiencing is the Chatter application’s fault, but he’s given me some things to try that may have helped reduce the frequency of the instabilities.
A number of readers will probably ask why I didn’t go back to Cingular immediately? After all, the problems I’m experiencing now are much more severe than anything I experienced prior to this firmware update. The reason I waited this long is because I depend on Chatter so much that I wanted to rule out problems with that application first. I don’t think I’ve totally eliminated the possibility of a problem with Chatter, but I’ve done all I could.
What I’m planning to do tomorrow is contact Cingular and try to get routed to the Wireless Data Group. These folks are generally the only people in the Customer Service / Technical Support system who have a good handle on the issues with Treos, Blackberrys, and other high end handsets.
Technorati Tags: Treo 650, Cingular, Treo 650 firmware updates, WSOD, Chatter Email