It turns out PalmOne’s new Treo 650 is shipping with a major problem that’s causing first adopter users and developers to cancel their orders in droves.
Filesystem Problems with the Treo 650s
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Eugenia Loli
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Mistakes like this can be very costly in tight markets. I hope this doesn’t pave the way for an “it mostly works” attitude!
There are some good comments to that Slashdot thread that explain why. PalmOne obviously thought the advantages of their new filesystem outweighed the disadvantages, and I think they were right.
I can’t really agree there. On a desktop or laptop system a little wasted space isn’t a very big deal but when your dealing with a small portable device that ranges from having 8MB or storage (well all devices I know of have much more then this now) to 512MB of storage there isn’t really much space to waste.
PalmOne should have through this through better and realized any waste of space on a handheld system, no matter how miniscule, can become a big deal very quickly when a user has a lot of data on a device.
There are some good comments to that Slashdot thread that explain why. PalmOne obviously thought the advantages of their new filesystem outweighed the disadvantages, and I think they were right.
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Just another example of how the lame ideas of the UI and filesystem designers should *NOT* be taken seriously.
Did they care that their “NEW AND IMPROVED” filesystem
would wreck havoc with users existing data?
Sure doesn’t look like it.
Looks like “Hey this is KOOL” won out over common sense
in yet another idiot-designed filesystem.
Most likely they switched from a NOR-based flash device (looks like an ordinary ROM) to a NAND-based flash (looks more like a modern hard disk, you read in sectors). With it they probably had to implement a new file system and didn’t take into account the increased overhead of the new fs. A simple engineering mistake. They should have increased the size of the system partition to account for this.
Posters at /. who have identified themselves as actual users of the device seem to think it’s rather okay. Anyway, what percentage of actual users would ask about the filesystem used?
The lead in to the actual article could also use some rewording for objectivity. Casual readers (who just skim over the headline) would be inclined to think it is really a big deal, where as the actual discussions (on /.) prove otherwise.
The evidence upon which this statement is based is a handful of posts on a community forum. Perhaps we should wait for some reviews and sales reports before making this call.
Many Treo users use Seven’s wireless Exchange synchronization tools. Seven’s offering includes remote address lookups against AD. I don’t think these customers will be too concerned, since they don’t tend to collect too many entries in their address books, and rarely use more than a couple of third-party applications, if any. At least that’s the trend I see at work (Tier II tech support, major wireless provider).
I’m not too happy about the _reduced_ available memory and increased filesystem overhead, since I’m sure I’ll be taking calls from some folks who are bitten by the limitation, but I don’t think it will be a major call driver.