If you read a lot of technology blogs, you know that most of them have been talking about the introduction of a Non Volatile File System (NVFS) on the palmOne Treo 650 and how the memory allocation scheme in the current NVFS implementation has reduced the amount of data that can be stored on a Treo 650 as compared to the Treo 600.
Since the news of the NVFS issue broke, a couple of major newspaper technology columnists have addressed the issue. They were considerably less critical than some bloggers have been:
- Rob Pegoraro, Washington Post, December 5: “The 650’s internal memory, like that on PalmOne’s Tungsten T5, preserves data even when the battery is spent. The trade-off is that data will occupy slightly more room in this model, but the 23.7 megabytes provided should still be plenty for all but hard-core users.”
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Walter Mossberg, Wall Street Journal, December 2: “PalmOne made the memory change for a very good reason: to implement a welcome new feature that protects your data when the battery dies. But the unintended consequence was that very small data entries, like a name and phone number, now occupy more memory than they did in the past. As a result, address books, calendars and other things take up more room. This downside, which wasn’t disclosed by the company when it introduced the 650, has touched off a wave of criticism from Treo power users, who discovered the problem only when they bought the new model and tried to copy over their programs and files….”
“I still believe the Treo 650 is a welcome improvement over the already very good Treo 600, and that it is the best combination phone, organizer and e-mail device on the market. But, if I had known about this memory issue when I reviewed the 650 in October, I’d have warned power users to hold off on upgrading until the company had a fix.”
As a Treo 180 user, I wondered why my Treo would completely lose its memory from time-to-time, requiring me to resync and possibly experience a data loss. I thought this was a bug in the Treo, not a situation where the battery drained so much that it couldn’t keep the internal memory alive. Now that I know this was the case, I am glad that palmOne put this feature in the Treo 650. What took them so long?
As a software developer, I recognize how a operating system or API-level change like this can subtly change the behavior of everything that sits on top of it. I’m not surprised that there are kinks in the way memory allocation is done in a completely new filesystem on a flash memory-based device.
Hopefully, palmOne will aggressively update the Treo 650’s firmware and take this issue off the table as much as possible. I think Walter Mossberg is right that it was shortsighted of palmOne to release the 650 with the same amount of internal memory as the 600, even a slight increase to 48-Megabytes would have been an 80-percent solution. That doesn’t change the fact that the Treo 650 is the best integrated handheld communication device on the market today.