Treo 650 Updater 1.17 for Cingular released November 2005

In August of last year, I replaced my aging Samsung i330 with a brand new Cingular Treo 650. It shipped with the latest software, which was Treo650-1.15-CNG at the time. I wrote about some really annoying problems, but the one that’s really bothered me the entire time is how the device keeps turning the screen off after seconds, not 3 minutes as I’ve got configured in the preferences. Well, somehow I missed Palm’s Treo 650 Updater 1.17 for Cingular that was released a month after, in November. There’s a bunch of fixes that are part of the update, but the one I’m most interested in:

Correctly saves Auto-off power setting. This addresses an issue experienced by some users after installing updater version 1.15

Glory be and halleluja! As I write this, I’m in the process of installing the update. A HotSync, a hard reset, the update installs, another HotSync … and it’s done! But, what has it done to my poor phone? It’s totally messed up! The phone won’t power on. Going to Phone Info, it’s blanked out Number, IMEI Number, SA Number and Firmware fields. Going into Prefs, selecting Network under Communication throws me an error: “Network Error … The network library is not available.” Crap! Okay, if being a long-time owner of crappy PalmOS devices has taught me anything, it’s this: when stuff stops working, hard-reset and restore from HotSync. So, that’s what I do … no luck. The phone works fine after the hard-reset, but after I restore my stuff with a HotSync, it stops working again. You know what this means … I’m going to be spending hours playing “Where’s Waldo” with my user profile folder, adding PRC files back in one at a time until I figure out which one is causing the Treo to hang. Oh, I’m so not looking forward to this.

I might post an update after I get this thing working again. Or, I might try and find a way to revert it to the 1.15 version of the software. Or, throw it out the window and finally get a non-PalmOS PDA phone. Argh!

UPDATE: After playing the twiddle-with-my-backup-folder game and HotSync’ing over and over, finally removing DocumentsToGo got the Treo working again. Yay! And, yes, the “keeps turning the screen off prematurely” problem is fixed.

Tags:
palm,
treo 650,
cingular,
update,
crap