I’ve been using a Treo 650 for more than several months now. Overall I adore it. It represents a near perfect combination of mobile computing and communication. Not the best marriage of those two qaulities, but a good compromise. However, during this time I have seen the best and worst this little gadget has to offer, and its worst aspect has a name; Garnet.
PalmOS Garnet is so wickedly unstable it has become a liability. For the past two weeks my Treo spontaneously resets itself while sitting idle. I can be walking around and suddenly I hear the unmistakable phone activation chime emanating from my pocket. Yep, Garnet crashed again. Other times the device will inexplicably freeze up on me while I’m in the middle of something. It just freezes. You can’t even shut the damn thing off. Which means I have to pop the battery cover off, poke the reset button, and wait for my Treo to regain consciousness.
Earlier in the week I decided to switch the Treo over from my Mac to the PC as its primary sync host. Naturally I did a hard reset, made sure the old PalmOne directories were gone in Windows so as not to infect the Treo with legacy applications and data files. Everything went perfect. Then after several uses of VersaMail, it suddenly lost all my account settings after yet another crash. Gone! Even after setting my email account profiles back up, VersaMail will no longer connect with the GPRS network, it doesn’t even try. Immediately when you tap on the “Get” button an Alert message appears saying “Unable to establish PPP connection”. *Sigh* I could switch to SnapperMail, but why should I spend $30 or more to replace a flawed feature in a $600 Smartphone? It’s inexcusable.
I don’t blame Palm for this (except VersaMail). They have done a great job with the hardware aspect. Unfortunately they are at the mercy of the OS. As such, it’s no surprise Palm is readying a Windows Mobile Treo. In fact, I expect further devices supporting that OS coming from Palm next year. They have to, not only in order to stay competitive, but to stay in business! Garnet is doing to Palm what it does to my Treo.
The Treo 650 is so unreliable (thanks to Garnet) that I eagerly await the arrival of Windows Mobile to Palm’s Treo line. There are a lot of things I strongly dislike about Windows Mobile (which is why I tend to favor PalmOS over that solution), but honestly, PalmOS is now so unstable I no longer consider it to be a trustworthy mobile computing environment. And Windows Mobile 5 looks ever more compelling. At least I don't worry about replacing the bloody Inbox.
About me
Is MacBook Falling Behind the Crowd?
Gee! I have a CDMA 650 on Sprint. After I did the ROM upgrade the machine has been as stable as any other Palm I've ever used, and I have it chock full of all sorts of stuff. I do email, GPS and stress it in all sorts of other ways. No problems. I can't honestly say that my Tungsten C, Clies, or T3 were any more stable than my current machine. I wonder if you have a defective unit.
Posted by: Paul Biba | September 16, 2005 8:11 PM
How stable your Treo runs may depend on a number of different factors, like what third party software you have installed, etc.
My Treo ran perfectly...for a while. After time and trial, stability began to deteriorate. The auto-reset bug I mentioned only just began two weeks ago. For a time my Treo would reset itself SEVERAL TIMES a day. VeraMail is a hit or miss app. It randomly causes soft resets for no explainable reason. Most of the time it works decently.
But this sums up the entire PalmOS (Garnet) experience...unpredictability. One minute it works fine, then next..not so fine. I can't say how anxious I am to see PalmLinux become reality. Hell, I'm even desperate enough to experiment with Cobalt!
Posted by: Kent Pribbernow | September 16, 2005 11:40 PM
To blame an OS for one ill-running application??
VersaMail is not a good application - it resets any palm since it's full of bugs.. it's not the os.. it's one of the built in applicaitons.. it's much better and feature rich than it's counterpart in WM
There are stability problems in the OS - but I don't think you hit one of them..
WM is unstable because manytimes you find memory leaks the size of the flooding caused by Kathrina.
Have you tried Chatter+? If you have an IMAP server running - it's a delight! a push mail service with no service fees (only software license)
Moshe
Posted by: Moshe | September 18, 2005 8:20 PM
VersaMail is only the cause of the email account loss, not the other instability woes I'v encountered. Certainly not the spontaneous soft resets. That's something going on at the OS level.
And I strongly disagree with you that it's much "better and feature rich" that WM Inbox. Unless you consider buggy crashy software a feature?
Posted by: Kent Pribbernow | September 18, 2005 8:35 PM
I am pretty sure the auto reset is not caused by versamail, as I have exactly the same problem with versamail deleted from rom.
To tacle the famous "corrupt saved preference after crash" problem (like kill your versamail account setting, kill all other registration information and you have to re-register everything again), me have to closely stay with bbvfs, just keep backing up and restore...
The super slow motion can help by upgrading your rom and fireware (a bit...), it really depends on the phone reception. If you stay in a place with lousy reception for while, your phone goes very slow. So keep ResetMe handy so you only have to wait for a while under slow motion and don't have to open your back
http://mytreo.net/downloads/details-449.html?ResetMe
But don't get me wrong, I love my machine, it's just the reset made me life very difficult, especially when I put that into my bag and found it's reset, my phone is off and don't know how many calls that I missed...
Posted by: Jack Tong | September 23, 2005 4:00 AM
versamail is useless. Does anyone know how one can remove it from treo 650? Had to install AOL to use e mail.
Posted by: al | February 4, 2006 12:25 PM
VersaMail works pretty good for me ... just don't let all your memory get used up by email - keep your inboxes clean. I had the same problem where after a reset VersaMail wouldn't work ... Unable to establish PPP connection ... or something similar. The porblem was not with VersaMail, but the palm os defaults.
Go to Prefs, Network and click "connect". VersaMail worked perfectly after that.
Posted by: Rob | February 20, 2006 2:26 AM
I have upgraded GSM ROM to CDMA on treo 650. Now My original ROM has corrupted .
While restoring the original GSM ROM it is giving error
"error Updating checksum"
can you Please provide me solution?
Posted by: chandan srivastava | February 21, 2006 12:44 AM
I have upgraded GSM ROM to CDMA on treo 650. Now My original ROM has corrupted .
While restoring the original GSM ROM it is giving error
"error Updating checksum"
can you Please provide me solution?
Posted by: chandan srivastava | February 21, 2006 12:44 AM
I have my share of Treo 650 auto reboot problem, but I think I figured out the cause of it. If you have Verizon, here is the deal, Wireless Sync and Versamail cannot work together. You cannot delete Wireless Sync because it came with the phone. So you are stuck with it. But you can set it to not sync at all, but you must turn off every setting in the Wireless Sync config in the Treo (over 20 different settings buried in the program itself).
On Versamail, turn of the alert, this will also cause the treo to reboot. Beside alert, Versamail is great! it sync directly with my exchange server, email, calendar and contacts.
Personally, I hate Wireless sync, it is the worst program ever. I just wish Verizon would let you uninstall it.
Posted by: David Kwan | July 25, 2006 8:10 PM