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Shortly after Sprint started shipping palmOne's Treo 650—the first carrier to offer the smartphone—a number of subscribers reported the handset held fewer applications and less data than their previous PDAs and phones with the same amount of memory.

Today, the carrier and handheld vendor finally released a ROM update fix to this and other bugs, plus some enhancements.

Here's the story:

The problem, it turned out, centered around palmOne's implementation of non-volatile memory for the Treo 650’s 32 MB of RAM—only 23 MB available to the user (not that much by current smartphone standards)—and a new FAT-based storage implementation. Non-volatile RAM lets on the handset survive in case of an accidental power drain.

So instead of 14 bytes of data taking up 14 bytes of RAM, as in previous palmOne devices, the Treo 650 required that a minimum of 512 bytes be used no matter a file's size. This greatly increased the amount of space required for each data entry.

(Although the company's latest PDA, the Tungsten T5, implemented the same type of storage, its 256 MB of RAM reduced the impact of the problem.)

Sprint and palmOne's free firmware fix (Updater 1.08) corrects the memory issue by making storage much more efficient It enables multiple records (in the form of sixteen 32 byte mini-blacks) to be contained within a 512 byte block of data.

Unfortunately, Updater 1.08 doesn’t let Sprint customers use the Treo 650 as a Bluetooth modem. The mobile operator disabled the dial-up-networking feature of the smartphone because, Sprint asserted, it was buggy. palmOne and Sprint say a patch is still in the works.

Other performance and reliability enhancements enabled by the patch include: