It’s been a week since the Treo 650 arrived and I have to say I generally really like the upgrade from the 600. I am however, incredibly frustrated by the memory issue and find myself bumping up against the limits frequently. The Treo updaters which are starting to roll out this week allegedly give you more memory – at least on the carrier versions. I have to hope that my unlocked unit will be as lucky.
This morning I suffered my first reset loop, which sucks, but from what I’ve read the fact that it took this long makes me luckier than quite a few others. My issue started when my Treo ran out of memory during a hotsync… no way to have avoided that one from what I can tell. Everything had actually been working fine, but then not. I had to hard reset in order to regain control, which while frustrating was not the end of the world, since I have nightly scheduled backups in BackupMan. After a restore, I was back in business… I noticed that Bejeweled2 had copied itself back into RAM as well as leaving a copy on my card through PowerRun. I don’t know whether this happened before or after the issue at hand, but clearly had closed the memory gap on me.
The Treo is definitely finicky as you get close to the end of the available memory… If you go lower than 3MB you are likely to have some issues with apps causing resets. The thing about having such a limited amount of memory is that you have to make certain decisions as well as “sacrifices.” In my case, I’ve decided I can live without Vindigo and without automatically updating QuickNews, though I am not happy about the loss of either. I don’t use either hourly or even daily, but certainly often enough that I enjoy having them available. I will now have to update specific channels within QuickNews or use a wireless portal for news on the go (though certainly not on the subway or out of range locations!). I can rely on Google’s wireless version or via SMS as well as Synfonic for quick lookups.
Memory issues aside, I am very happy with the Treo. I would certainly like for PalmSource to enable the use of expansion cards as in the same way an external drive works on my computer… SD cards have been used long enough in the hardware that you would think this might have been addressed by now. I don’t recall seeing anything about that in OS 6, though the Treo will most likely not be upgradeable anyhow.