PalmOne has admitted that the flash-based storage system of the eagerly awaited Treo 650 offers less storage space than the older Treo 600 unit did with its SDRAM based system. Responding to complaints from the first people to adopt the Treo 650, PalmOne have cancelled orders for its latest offering.

PalmOne have responded to the complaints by offering every Treo 650 owner a free128MB SD memory card, a huge increase from the 32MB the phone has onboard. They have also stated that they would offer a ROM update that will reduce the size of the memory blocks at a later date.

The Treo 650 is said to have ample memory for new users, but anyone upgrading from a Treo 600 to the 650 might run into difficulty. The problem has arisen because the memory of the new phone is divided into 512B sections. When files smaller than 512B are stored in the Flash-memory, they still take up 512B of space. This causes files being copied to the new phone from the older model to appear bigger than they really are. The same system has been used in another PalmOne offering, the Tungsten T5 PDA, creating more problems for the company.

The reason PalmOne adopted this new system was to solve a major problem with the older model. When the battery ran out on the Treo 600, all the memory on the phone was erased automatically due to the memory system it used. The new Flash-based memory solved that issue, which was a burden to users who were away from a power source for an extended period of time.

However this isn't the first issue that customers have had with the Treo 650. Initial specs for the phone promised a megapixel camera but the final model shipped with an improved 640x480 camera instead falling behind the standards set by the latest smartphones. Moreover the new model is said to be a lot slower than its predecessor. It remains to be seen if PalmOne can recover from these problems and save the image that the fantastic Treo 600 created for the company.

Source: IT Observer