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Shortly after people started receiving their new palmOne Treo 650 from Sprint—the first carrier to offer the smartphone—it became apparent that the new handsets stored fewer applications and less data than earlier palmOne handhelds, including the Treo 600—with the same 32MB of memory.

To help alleviate customer's concerns, palmOne has promised to create a system upgrade for the Treo 650, and the also affected Tungsten T5 PDA, so the devices can manage and store data a lot more efficiently. Since this update could take a few months to develop, the company said, in the meantime, it would give a free 128MB Secure Digital card to all Treo 650 owners.

Memory Shortage
The Treo 650 and Tungsten T5 implement a non-volatile memory technology with a new FAT file system that stores information—it turns out—less efficiently than the company's previous file system.

So while data is safer than before, you can store less of it.

For instance, 14 bytes of data took up 14 bytes of RAM in previous palmOne devices. The new handhelds require that a minimum of 512 bytes be used no matter a file's size. The net result is an increase in the amount of space required for each data entry.