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Handhelds Hardware

Memory Problems (And Fixes) For Palm-OS Devices 95

Posted by timothy from the I-don't-recall-what-I-don't-remember dept.
Stonent writes: "Palm computing has just announced that a number of 8MB units produced between October 1999 and May 2000 may have some faulty memory. They are currently working on a patch for the IIIXe and have one for the Vx and IIIC. You can read about it on the Palm Computing site. I'm just wondering why they are supplying a software patch for a hardware issue. Intel tried this with the FDIV bug and look where it got them."

And those of us who went with The Other Company aren't off the hook either. An Anonymous Coward writes: "There's no mention of it on their main webpage, but apparently some Handspring Visors shipped with faulty DRAM. See if you're one of the unlucky ones, like me, by running the test program included here. I found out mine was faulty and called 'Customer Care' -- after a brief runaround I learned that the unit wouldn't be replaced, instead a patch would be out in *mid July*. Gee, thanks Handspring. Blinded by the allure of Springboard modules, I took DRAM over FlashRAM in the Palm IIIxe. With bad DRAM and substantive Springboards (wireless ethernet, bluetooth, 6-pack) looking more and more like vaporware, I'm regretting my decision."
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Memory Problems (And Fixes) For Palm-OS Devices More

Memory Problems (And Fixes) For Palm-OS Devices

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  • My room mate got an 8 Meg pilot for her birthday and has had to cold reset it (Losing all her data) a couple of times. I've never had any problem with my 2MB Palm 5 and was giving her a hard time about whatever it was she was doing to screw things up. Now it turns out to probably be a memory bug. Gonna have to get her to check it out and see if the software patch fixes the problem for her.
  • *All* floating point units have bugs. Floating point math isn't exactly easy to implement on silicon at high speeds. That's why there's such bragging rights on being able to do it quickly.

    Usually these bugs are simply rounding errors, simple things to work around. Look in the code of any compiler, you'll see plenty of workarounds.

    Intel's major error wasn't in having an FDIV bug in their chip. Intel's first error was in marketing their processor as though it were a consumer device.

    Intel's second error was in initially pretending there was no bug. The appropriate response would have been to rush the workaround code to every compiler vendor in existance and make sure the engineering and mathematical communities that really needed it could get it.

    Intel's third error was in treating every customer like a dumb consumer and telling them they weren't nearly cool enough to be affected by such an obscure little bug, and to go back to playing tetris and forget about it.

    THAT's how you turn a minor logic error into a major recall.

  • Ok, so a month ago I got a Vx so I could travel and not have to lug around a notebook (modem, email client, telnet client, avantgo... it's all I need).

    So anyways, now I'm running this stupid "detection utility" which is supposed to take 30min. Well right now it's beeping madly (you'd think they could do a silent check, but nooooo). Maybe they want people who have faulty Palm's to go insane and throw them out the window, that way they won't have to replace them.

    I don't know, but I'm not 10min into the beeping and it's DRIVING ME NUTS!!!
  • I admit that I haven't checked it out too thoroughly but I see two problems with Psion's offerings.
    1. They have Keyboards. Once I got used to Grafitti, I never wanted to use a cramped handheld keyboard that made the unit heavier by its very existence. The sales numbers imply that I am not alone. Handhelds outsell palmtops by a wide margin.
    2. They're big -- because they have keyboards. See point 1.
    3. Too Windows oriented. Many Windows users probably go with WinCE over Psion because of the MS brand and Windows name and because they view the Psion (unfairly) as a WinCE knock-off.

    Talent should always come first but without the right packaging and marketing, it is wasted.

    Palm is a good example of this; just look at their ads. A good-looking guy on one train sees a beautiful woman on the next train. They both have Palm Pilots. The woman beams the guy her phone number.
    Suliminal message: The Palm Pilot will help you organize your life and get you laid.

    Compare that to Microsoft's PocketPC ads. A smug looking guy or girl points at you and asks, "Can your Palm do this?"
    Subliminal message: Neener, neener I've got this kewl new toy and you don't because you've got a Palm Pilot.
    Not a big incentive to switch.

    Does Psion even advertise in the United States?

  • From Palm's own FAQ:

    Q. Does the patch have any side-effects or impact battery life?

    A. Depending upon individual usage patterns there may be an impact on battery life. Since Palm Vx and IIIc include rechargeable batteries it is unlikely that users will experience negative battery impact. Again, depending upon personal usage patterns IIIxe users may notice an impact on battery life.

    Now, I realize that they're not saying that battery life will be affected. However, have you ever seen a "may happen" warning that didn't come true?

    This product may cause drowsiness.

    This product may cause nausea.

    This product may cause lung cancer.

    This product may cause shortened battery life.

    Those usually tend to translate to: "The following will happen, or else we wouldn't be required by law to tell you about it."

    Yes, I know that I'm using a bit of hyperbole. However, I'm just not terribly reassured by Palm's statement.

  • There's an important distinction to be made, though, between "results that need a fixup for IEEE compliance" and "producing an incorrect answer". Most chips fall into the first category by design, and they include "hints" to help in the fixup process (FP status words, etc). FDIV caused certain divisors to yield less-than-signle-precision accuracy on division. It can be fixed by (this is the list that comes immdiately to mind):
    • Trapping all FDIV instructions and examining the operands
    • Inserting code into the compiler that tests for the magic operand values before executing an FDIV instruction
    • Inserting code into the compiler that proves inductively that the arguments cannot be the magic values
    The first is a performance killer (SoftFP anyone?) The third is tricky to get right. The second and third break backward compatibility (i.e. old code will produce incorrect results).

    Also: intel didn't pretend there was no bug - rather, they said "yeah, we've known about it for months, but noone except Prof. Nicely will get bitten by it more than once every thousand years." IBM counter-claimed that it would bite every few days and stopped shipping Pentium-based PCs, and that's when Intel started re-thinking their position.

  • 30 minutes to run the test on a palm?
    The visor version of the test took a fraction of a second.

    I kind of figured my visor would pass the test - with all of the fun I've been having with my Eye Module [eyemodule.com] I've been filling up my ram every day.

    (If you want to see what pictures I've been taking, I have some up here [ofdoom.com]. Noting spectacular - just playing around.
    --
    Email address is real.
  • Personal Dead-tree Assistant
  • 30 minutes to run the test on a palm? The visor version of the test took a fraction of a second.

    Hmm, I guess either all the good programmers left to work for Handspring, or Palm programmers are more interested in cute beeping sounds than in getting it to run fast. BTW it ended up taking about 20min, but at the end it played a little tune. I might run it again and put an LCD timer on it just to scare people at the bank (err, wait... is that legal?).
  • By using this alternative input device (lead pencil), the spiral notebook PDA (tm) may be altered from a Write once, read many device into a full duplex read-write device.

    By supplying this patch, Mead shows their willingness to cooperate with the open-source community. The source for creating a lead pencil is freely available. They are easy to make and can even be broken into seperate components, so that you have one device for writing data and another for removing it from the PDA.

    I'm holding off on buying one until they make the memory access faster - I want to play DVD movies on my Mead Spiral Notebook PDA.
  • I bought a 3 year warranty/service plan with my Palm from Best Buy. I wonder if I could return it for a new one....


    "I shoulda never sent a penguin out to do a daemon's work."
  • I have never seen a Palm Pilot advert, but the one you describe sounds quite good.

    The keyboards on the Psions are strangely usable, the best Handheld keyboard that there is. The screens are also touch sensitive, there just isn't a handwriting recognition system on them yet. They are faster than graffiti.

    Symbian is going to be using EPOC as its core OS, with a custom UI, maybe using the Palm UI, the EPOC UI, or one deidicated to the task. The Ericsson R380 mobile phone (320x100ish phone length screen) will be one of the first Symbian phones, with built in PDA. Bluetooth probably won't make it into this phone. In the future Palm might even be using EPOC as their underlying OS, with the good Palm desktop (palmtop?) on top of it. I think I recall Palm saying that they would be moving to an ARM based product line in the future, as the Dragonball processor wasn't good enough.

    EPOC also has full document embedding, a la COM or KParts or whatever, but on a 36MHz CPU that you can carry around in your pocket. Not bad, in my opinion. With ARM cpus available at 233MHz now, the usability and features of the handheld devices that utilise ARM processors can only go up - see the Samsung Yopy.

    And the killer is, the ARM processors are beautiful to program. What more could you ask for? Colour? Psion 7 and NetBook have that. Apps? All built-in and well-designed. Synchronisation? Amongst the best on the market. Style? Don't you want a Palmtop with a leather case? And the Psion 5 range is quite mature, and doesn't suffer from DRAM problems :-). The next range of Psion products should be excellent.

    Don't underestimate other contenders though. Tao are looking hot with their technology (Sony, Motorola and Amiga are licensees). QNX have a great product, if they can finalise it. In the end, the OS won't matter though, only the apps. I see VP applications (Virtual Processor, similar to Java, but better, see Tao for more information) as the way forward.

    Other CPUs? Low power x86 (National Semiconductor Geode, Transmeta). SH3 and SH4 from Hitachi. MIPs. Motorola Coldfire. This is the fun end of computing, unlike the terminally dull x86 PC!

  • You're reading a tad much into the AC's posting (probably because it would seem you're overreacting to the severity of the bug, given other comments you've made).

    My understanding of what this person said is "Please don't go apeshit all over me, just because I'm the one you got on the phone and I'm telling you something you don't like".

    So you want a replacement unit, not a patch. Does that mean you now should scream obscenities at this person? I think not. They have very little say in what can be done, and I bet you that their managers TOLD THEM to push the patch instead of a replacement unit.

    Is it really so damn hard to be POLITE? Have people forgotten how to get their way without resorting to shock tactics of volume, vulgarity, and verbosity?

  • What makes you think that there are _any_ good IIIxe units out there? Palm's web site says something ambiguous about the problem being limited to a small percentage of 8mb units, but they don't say what percentage of IIIxes are affected. I know my IIIxe has the problem. Four times in the last three months, it has locked up... that's the bug writing over applications or OS. It takes almost half an hour to do a complete restore. Two or three times a week, I get an error message from the HotSync manager... I bet that's the bug writing over my data. I am a little bit miffed at Palm, because their FAQ goes on and on about how "trivial" this bug is and how easy it will be to fix and how amazingly unlikely it is that YOUR Palm product is affected. They do not, however, offer any real description of the symptoms, nor do they offer any advice on how to get by while waiting for a IIIxe patch.
  • I have a vx, and I am a bit annoyed by the problem. After finding out what the problem was though, and the fix I feel better. The unit is rechargeble, so Im not pooring more money in to batteries. It charges fully in no time, so I don't really mind if it spends and extra five minutes in the cratel each night. I still love my palm, even if it has a few mental problems. My two cents

  • I disagree. AC gave me the distinct impression that his customer tolerance has withered (hey, I understand, I used to work tech support) and that it was time for him to change to a less public-oriented job. I may be wrong, but I've seen it too often.

    No, I absolutely do not believe that a customer support staffer should have to put up with verbal abuse. There was nothing that made me more sociopathic than being ranted at by some drunken luser who couldn't understand that the problem was on his end and not ours. However, for him to imply that people seeking hardware replacements for their defective equipment are whiny and undeserving of attention was out of hand, in my opinion.

    As far as the severity of the problem: How badly will my (IIIxe-non-rechargable) batteries be affected by the new sleep state? If you can't answer that, and Palm themselves seem unable or unwilling to do so, then please don't say that I'm overreacting. While I may be barking at the moon, noone knows for sure right now. My purchased hardware is possibly defective, and the solution may end up causing me to spend more money on batteries.

  • Well... I own a handspring, and like it, but I lelieve that in thier rush to serve the demands of the market, some QC was overlooked. My first handspring fried itself in the cradle one morning for no particular reason - this was after sporadially going out for a few days, requireing a hard reset, and a subsequent reload of data from my PC. So I went through the "Customer Care" hotline (not a 1-800 number BTW). It took me ~ an hour to get to speak to someone, and then I had to go through all the idiot proofing questions before I could get a return authorization (" Does the Handspring have batteries, sir?") So a week later I get my brand-spankin new one. Well, I guess this one has the %$#@!$ memory error because, while it is fine as long as I play with it, If I leave it alone for more than a week, it crashes, requiring a hard reset. MAye it's just lonely ( I really have no idea if a memory error is to blame for this - but hey, it sounds plausible) So, basically, I should have went with a Palm and shelled out a few more $$$.
  • TRGpro [trgpro.com] has an explanation available: http://www.trgpro.com/support/faq_dram. html [trgpro.com]
    There's a echnical Description" about half way down the page.
  • There is no patch [conxion.com], there is no spoon.
  • BTW, could someone who has 8MB tell me how much they have BEFORE they run the pat^H^H^H test program? AFTER running it I'm showing 7936K (on a Palm Vx), which doesn't sound quite right.
  • after all, I ran a GUI (GeOS) on my C-64... it wasn't quite as good as the PalmOS, but not too much worse. If I can run a drawing program through a GUI in 64k, I could probably conquer the world in 8 MB... [/stupid nostalgia]

  • A little more info (Score:4)

    by killbill ( 10058 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @03:57AM (#966398) Homepage
    Interestingly, it was TRG that found the bug, and told Palm and Handspring. These guys are really on top of their game. This is probably why the TRG fix is out first.

    Also, TRG released yesterday their AutoCF enhancement, that lets many applications and databases reside on the compact flash. What this effectively means is that you can now have a palm with hundreds of megabytes of effective memory. They did an outstanding job on it.

    As for other comments on the lack of flashable roms on the handspring (and some palms like the IIIe), the only real disadvantage is that patches must be layered back on in the event of a total system rebuild, and take up just a little more memory. Neither of these things is even remotely a big deal in real world use.

    Palmstation [palmstation.com] has a lot more information on the topic, complete with some appearences from at least one of the TRG folks to answer questions.

    The actual bug had to do with one of the ways you can instruct the DRAM to self refresh in sleep mode... the hardware was buggy. There was about a 1/8000 chance that it would corrupt some random memory location, and it got executed once a minute. This translates to something being nuked once a week, which may or may not be used memory, and may or may not cause a problem.

    The patch was simply to use a different self refresh mode, that is almost as good, and has the added advantage of not being broken.:)

    Hats off to TRG... these people continue to amaze me, from the days of custom modifying their 8MB upgrade cards to boot linux to the current crop of TRG-Pro compact flash enabled Palm units.

    Bill
  • Don't you know that Firmware fixes all hardware problems. And if it isn't firmware fixable, it is a "feature"!

    Actually I am trying to hack the Palm Firmware to turn it into a Espresso machine. (if you tell that to someone in marketting, I bet they would believe you too....)
  • It took so long to find because it is such a rare problem. It only happens in chips from one manufacturer, and not all of those. And it only manifests itself when the memory is full or almost full. Since companies use more than one supplier for components, it problably took a while to narrow down all possible causes and find the real culprit. It took a smaller company like TGR to find the problem, no doubt because with fewer units to sort through, the cause was easier to determine.
  • What does Cisco have to do with handhelds at all? The original Pilot was produced by US Robotics, which was bought by 3Com, and then Palm was spun off from 3Com. :)

    As for the "Fords outsell Volkswagens after all", apparently you think Ford's marketing [ford.com] is more expensive than Volkswagen's [turbonium.com]? Or maybe it's that Ford sells more types of cars perhaps? (Compare those two sites, by the way, I think you'll agree which was probably a bigger design challenge.)
  • Thats why I said "with hundreds of megabytes of effective memory" instead of "with hundreds of megabytes of memory".

    You point out some valuable information, and I am glad it is posted here, but in terms of day to day use one would be hard pressed to tell a difference for any reasonably static information (which is just about all programs and a big percentage of larger databases).

    I guess the distinction should be brought up though, so I am glad you made the point. Offhand, the only time I can think that this might be an issue is with huge collections of AvantGo data, which might be large and is generally pretty dynamic.

    As for PDB's however, I have the entire NIV translation of the new testament in compact flash now via AutoCF, and it runs great. Let me try a doc file (....click ....scratch ....click) Yup, doc files (most definately PDB's) work great (with Teal Doc anyway) also.

    It would be interesting to know the swapping (which is effectively what is happening here) algorithim TRG uses, and how it handles things like TealDoc, which can open any one of many PDB data files. Though this is a tangent to a tangent to the original post, so I suppose we ought to take it to palm station or some other palm forum (where more then the two of us care about the TRG Pro :)

    Bill

  • Handspring has no flash memory. Instead, the OS is loaded into DRAM like everything else. Why? So that they can easily issue software patches to people that don't require flashing! Software patching to fix something like this is not only what Palm is doing, but also, one of the reasons why Handspring went with their design in the first place.

    Actually, the OS on a Handspring is in ROM. The reason they did that is to save money. There is no technical advantage to it. There is no reason that Palm couldn't release a software patch just like Handspring. They have chosen to instead release a patch that goes into flash memory so that it won't be lost on a hard reset.

    This isn't necessarily good. I don't know what the procedure is for doing the upgrade on a Palm. If it involves reflashing the entire OS, then I think they need to rethink it a little. However, it probably just involves taking nearly the same patch that you are getting for your Handspring and putting it in flash. For myself, I know that if Palm released the upgrade as a software patch, I would use FlashPro to burn it into flash myself and get the same effect.

    There's nothing wrong with putting the OS in ROM the way Handspring has done, but it is not an added feature.

  • In the engineering world, there are two types of decisions: the right one (aka the one made by engineers), and the money one (aka the one made the biznez men).

    When demand is high and yields are low, the biznez men make decisions to scrap QA and ship to meet biznez numbers, metrics, and to appease the ever-so-picky gods of biznez (aka Wall Street).

    Unfortunately, that is the sad truth of electronics and computer stuffs. Right now the economy is good, which means a need for more and more toys. That coupled with a shortage of raw materials...causes major problems.

    It isn't just memory that is being hit, many electronic components are having shortages. Even BIG BLUE can't make enough hard drives...

    Oh well
  • I asked this same question to one of the TRG guys (the company that found the bug in the first place, and had the first patch out).

    According to them, this won't make a significant difference in battery life. They still use a power saving mode, just a different one then the one that causes the problem.

    So don't panic yet.

    Bill

  • Apples and oranges.

    Palm costs $150-$400, isn't suitable as an mp3 player, gets 60+ hours of battery life, and is very readable day and night, in any light situations.

    Cassiopea costs $500+, can play mp3s, lasts six to eight hours on a charge, and can only be read in deep shade or at night.

    These are different devices with different abilities in different price ranges.

  • the customer service side of the issue (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am a customer service agent for one of the affected companies, and while I am usually quite happy to do whatever I can for customers, I would just like it known here and now that the last thing that I need to hear during an average day is someone yelling at me to get a new unit when a patch will fix the problem.

    I wish that you could all just learn to deal with it. You complain all the time for charges for replacements on broken LCD screens, but if you want to get free replacements for fixable problems, don't you think that that might cause the price to go up even more?

    I'm amazed each and every day by what people think it is their "right" to get, and while many times they are correct and receive what they are asking for, many more times they just end up yelling, screaming, guilting, threatening, or swearing to try to get what they think to be theirs.

    I didn't intend for this to become a rant on the maltreatment of customer service agents, but after being almost reduced to tears by the rudeness and general lack of human decency of one "gentleman," yesterday, I have a hard time feeling overly sympathetic towards people who act more like spoiled children than adult consumers.

    -- just imagine what I'd be like in the postal service
  • Is it my fault that your company may have shipped me a faulty unit, and that I find your performance-decreasing "fix" unacceptable?

    How do you know that the performance decreases? I tried to search the available resources but I didn't find anything. Unfortunately I don't know what the difference between the refresh modes means practically. Do you? - if yes, please post. Until it is a proven fact that the patch hurts you, you have no right to request a new unit from them, if the patch solves the problem. C'mon, had you got an unit with the defect and the patch already installed, would you notice?

    If you are using Intel processors, do you request a new processor every time Intel publicizes a new errata? Did you know, that your BIOS probably loads microcode patch to it on every boot and if it doesn't, your Linux driver can do it for you?

    It is unfortunate that such thing happened. People who lost their data have every rigth to bitch. But shit happens and to fix the problem in the most cost-effective way is also in the interest of customers. I am really more comfortable spending 5% more on batteries (if the battery life is really affected) than having to buy the next unit at $50 more.

    You're no longer in touch with your job description, and have forgotten exactly what it is that you're supposed to be doing for your company and your public.

    Well, I think he is doing exactly what the company told him to.

    On your webpage you say you are working as programmer for an ISP (btw, your server doesn't seem to recognize that there is an index.html in the directory). Are you really, really sure that your customers never lost a cent due to screwup on your side? If yes, come to Europe, the company where I work needs such people - actually we have yet to see someone like that :-)


  • Two old jokes:

    Q: How many software guys does it take to change a burnt-out lightbulb?
    A: None -- it's a hardware problem.

    Q: How many hardware guys does it take to change a burnt-out lightbulb?
    A: None -- we'll just work around it in software.
  • So did my Palm Vx, which according to Palm's site "might" have been one of the affected units. So, at least it doesn't seem that every unit shipped with 8 MB was bad, and hopefull the numbers were as small as Palm is claiming.

  • Actually, it makes OS upgrading and patching EASIER, because you just toss the files in ram. The downside is that it eats up memory you could otherwise use to store other programs. The whole point to the handspring not having flash is to save you money, and the OS patches are usually quite small.

  • I assume you have OS 3.5? (Launcher, /i, Version) If you do, on 8 MB units it takes 256 KB of the unit RAM for the heap. So, 8192 - 256 = 7936. OS 3.5 uses a differently-sized heap depending on system RAM size, whereas on OS 3.3, it's always 128 KB (causing my slightly-older Vx to show 8064 KB total RAM).

    Ok, I actually installed OS 3.5... it had some nice features, but still felt a little unpolished, so I jumped back to 3.3 for now. Hurry up and get a final 3.5 release ready, Palm! :p
  • Reboot cold and lose all data? Don't tell me she never synced?
  • Well, it's not like there's some particular feature of the Visor that makes it possible to do software-only patches where you can't on the Palm - it's the same software, just on a ROM instead of an EEPROM (flash-ROM). Palm just decided that the flash ROM should be modified, making the fix permanent, instead of adding another piece of software you have to reload if you ever have to reload your Palm.

    As others have said, Handspring's decision wasn't one of user convenience, it was a cost-reducing measure.
  • Oops yes not Cisco at all - I blame too many beers the night before. Fords have always consistently out-sold Volkswagens here in the UK, despite the fact that Volkswagens have always been better quality (although to be fair to Ford they are finally getting there). My point is that suckers will always buy well-marketed crap rather than take some time to find out if there are better alternatives.
  • That chimes with my experiences with my Palm Vx -- I had to get a replacement cradle shipped. The previous Vx had a faulty touchscreen, so that had to be replaced, and now this.

    This problem matches some reset problems I've had too, so I'll have to see if my Palm has this faulty DRAM.

    Definite quality issues there...

  • DRAM Problem FAQ (Score:5)

    by rak3 ( 43270 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @02:35AM (#966417)
    Check out these details [trgpro.com] about the memory problem from the TRGpro website, a maker of another Palm-OS PDA. They have a FAQ explaining in pretty good detail what the problem is and how they plan to go about fixing it.

  • Justification for a Software Patch (Score:3)

    by The Dodger ( 10689 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @02:36AM (#966418) Homepage

    If you consider that only one OS is supposed to run on the Palm, it does kinda make sense that they could supply a software patch which would check to see if there was faulty memory and, if there was, make an alteration to the OS to stop it from accessing that area of memory.

    Of course, there's quite a large margin for fuck-up if you're doing this sort of thing, and if someone can prove that their Palm's functionality/performance is affected by this, they should be able to get a replacement.

    D.

  • Perhaps the patch simply allocates the bad portion of memory with some useless data. If the data is protected by the OS, it would prevent it from ever being overwritten and since the data is useless, it would never cause a problem again.

    Sure, it sounds like it would waste your memory a bit, but I can't imagine it would be a huge chunk. I'm sure Palm users would rather lose a few kb of RAM than have to cross-ship their Palm and re-load all of their software.

    Incidentally, my Handspring Visor (which are also subject to the problem) was found to be not affected. Whew!

  • Well, mine was one of the Vx's that the diagnostic utility flagged as being defective (Serial 50GK14G....., assembled in malaysia if anyones interestd). Patch applied and things seem to be working fine (although I hadn't noticed any problems anyway). My take on the problem is that there was a batch of 8MB memory chips which couldn't hold their state for the usual memory refresh time. The patch causes the memory to be refreshed more often (thus shortening battery life), and may possibly blank out sections of memory from being used (I seem to have lost 60K of memory even though the RefreshFix was only 19K). Anyone feel that Palm should be offering to replace affected Vx's? This is a manufacturing defect after all.

  • Well... (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    Of course they'd make a software patch for it, if possible; that's much cheaper and more convenient for them.

    If that doesn't work, though, a replacement would definitely be in order. Also, I know if I paid that much for a Palm, I'd be pissed, and want any and all faulty hardware replaced.

    I find it hard to blame them, though: someone else shipped them faulty components! It's a shame that this didn't show up when either company should have been testing them, but I'd still blame the original manufacturer in this case.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • It seems that you cannot expect good customer service from a computer company. After Intel offered to foot the bill for the Rambus DRAM because its motherboard would not take SDRAM as advertisers, its stock dipped significantly. I guess this has scared these companies out of recalling the faulty units and replacing them free of charge.

    In my mind, corporate responsibility is as important as the bottom line. When JNJ realized that it was shipping bad pharmecuticals in the 1980s, it immediately recalled all shipments that could have tainted units at great expense to itself, earning reams of positive publicity and attention from consumer rights advocates. Now, I am a proud JNJ shareholder. Companies that take full responsibility for their actions and sacrifice profits in the interest of customer satisfaction will be rewarded in the end.

  • Other news site... (Score:3)

    by beebware ( 149208 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @02:32AM (#966423) Homepage
    The Register [theregister.co.uk] is also carrying the story (actually it started carrying it yesterday) and it gives some information about how the software patches the hardware.
    Richy C. [beebware.com]
    --
  • Why use a software patch? Because everything that runs on the Palm Computing platform runs PalmOS. (mostly :) Intel couldn't get away with it because there are so many OSes for the x86.
  • Well, luckily my IIIc isn't one of the affected ones :-) But even if it were, I would still be happy with it. They have a patch which fixes the issue, and they have a GREAT OS. The overhead is soooooo much less than that of M$FT's CE, the OS is faster (true, hardware is slower, but I dont need to be able to watch MPEGs on my Palm, I need to store addresses etc.) and the Grafitti is great. I love my Palm, and would buy another one any day... well, maybe after I get one of those Compaq iPAQ H3600... handheld with 206mhz Intel StrongARM processor, 32mb of ram, the thig is soooo sexy... but oh well :-)
    -Agelmar
  • I don't know about everyone else, but I find it a little annoying that it took them this long to find the problem/solution. These memory units started shipping in October '99, it's now July 2000: it took them 9 months to find this problem? It's understandable that a problem like this occurs, but I don't find it understandable it should take 9 months to find it.
  • They're fixing it in software because it can be fixed in software. FDIV was a hardware problem that was practically impossible to work around in software without a huge performance hit.

    This problem is entirely different. The DRAM chip is going into a power saving mode that doesn't quite work and loses information. All the software patch does is prevent the device from using that particular mode.

    Paul.

  • Oops, that right. The Cassi uses WinCE. And has 32MB. Still a sucky interface, but no worse than the Palms.


    Gonzo
  • This explains why Palm made even higher profits - they are using less than excellent components for their devices. Hopefully the Sony Palm device will have some decent design and quality behind it, and decent components. The memory stick slot looks like a useful thing as well, shame it is proprietary - I would prefer the Secure Digital card that the Palm will be using later this year - that is not proprietary.

    Still, they will allocate the bad memory as used, and all will be fine (as long as the bad memory is under 100K, nobody will mind much). Great advert for the storage capabilities of the devices though - it took 5 months to find the bug, because it took that long to even get near that area in memory.

    Still, although the Palm devices are quite nice and all that, I would buy a Psion 5mx, which is a darned nicer bit of equipment, or the Psion Revo, which is about the size of a Palm, but has a much larger screen and a full keyboard. I wonder why Psion has not really made it in America - I think they need better marketing. EPOC is the best palm-top OS, it beats PalmOS and Windows CE (PocketPC) by a mile.

    I might consider a 320x240 colour palm though, or the Yopy product if it ever gets finished.

    Anyway, I have no money, so what does it matter? :-)

  • I have been having the same strange problems lately. I added the TRG SuperPilot board to my PalmPro and after going above 2.5MB used, sometimes the device would not turn back on, even hitting the reset button would not work. I'd have to remove the batteries, open the case, short out C2 (so as not to have to wait days for it to discharge) and then turn it on, reload all data, etc... As I loaded more on it, it got worse; Now about every 1-2 days it bombs, sometimes making the backlight stuck on so as to waste batteries quickly. I tried to load TRG's OS update, but it's "Only for TRG devices" it told me, and I have heard nothing back from their tech support. Anyone else have the TRG SuperPilot board? Mine has the following markings on the DRAM chips: AM29LV160BB-120FC, 9846FBM P; and KM416V4104CS-L6. On the PCB: TRG980528 (not printed on, but in the design)

  • IIIxe has DRAM too, and the facts about the bug (Score:4)

    by hal-j ( 8004 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @02:41AM (#966431) Homepage
    A few comments


    to the fellow who was sorry he chose Handspring over Palm because he was stuck with a faulty DRAM: The IIIxe has DRAM too. You're right in saying that the Handspring units have no Flash, but thats an unrelated issue. Both have DRAM for the system memory/storage. The Palm units (most) have Flash memory where the OS is stored. This allows for OS upgrades and such. The handspring units don't have this, which makes OS upgrading a bit harder.


    As for the bug and why it was corrected with a software patch, you can get all teh details (including the technical version) here [trgpro.com]. The technical faq is near the bottom of the page. They just changed the mode that the DRAM is in during refresh, since one of the refresh modes did A Bad Thing[tm].
    -Hal

  • Why reload ? Just reset the Palm and do a hotsynch and everything is back just fine and dandy..

  • This is bullshit. I paid good money for a working computer, and I expect it to work.

    The path effectively removes one of the power-saving features of the Palm hardware, which readily fixes the bug, but causes increased power consumption when the unit is powered down (although you can't truly turn one off).

    No thanks. I have no intention of sacrificing my batteries to Shub-Hardware. I've signed up to receive the memory test and patch for my IIIxe when it's available. If my memory tests bad, then I'm RMAing the unit, just as I would any other defective unit.

    This is similar to Intel's FDIV fiasco. Palm is using a performance-damaging software workaround to cover faults in their hardware. I will not go along with this.

  • Aren't these units still under waranty? Don't tell me UCITA has made hardware waranties legaly-unbinding as well! Take it back to your place of purchase, tell 'em it's broken (which it is), and get a new one.

  • Oh, I don't blame them; no matter how good their processing plant is, they're still at the mercy of their vendors' quality control. Nonetheless, I still hold them responsible, much as I would a computer manufacturer who shipped units with faulty CD-ROMs, for example.

  • I think it's actually just like FDIV. This is a hardware problem that is impossible to solve without modifications that affect the performance of the power-saving features.

    All the FDIV patch did was trap and emulate faulty opcodes.

    In both cases, the manufacturers are using software to shunt execution flow away from damaged hardware components (from FDIV, from "Go Into Powersaving Mode") into lower-performing replacements ("safeDivide()", "Go Into Less Efficient Mode").

    No, I have to disagree with you. It's the same fundamental fix to the same fundamental problem.

  • Re:No probs with my PDA (Score:3)

    by IHateEverybody ( 75727 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @05:28AM (#966437) Homepage Journal

    I've heard that the HotSync feature of 'spiral notebooks' is notoriously slow. That said, the stylus interface is far more effective than Palm's implementation. :-)

    Yes, but the character recognition of 'spiral notebooks' sucks -- especially if the user is in medical school.

  • This is a PAA, not PDA. It is analog. HTH.

  • Actually, you can't run things directly from flash. I have a TRG, and have talked at length with TRG about this, and it is a common misconception about AutoCF. AutoCF provides a kind of alias to programs that are in your CF card. The alias is accessible just like any other program from the applications screen, BUT when you "run" the program, it is copied out of CF an into the Palm's main memory. When the program terminates, it is removed from main memory to free that space back up, leaving the original intact on the CF. All databases must be left in RAM as AutoCF doesn't seem to support the same dynamic relocation of .pdb's. Again, AutoCF does not map the CF memory directly into the Palm's main memory, and does not give you boundless memory to use for one application. You are still limited by the available RAM on the device.

    Dave

  • If you're being truthful, and really do work in one of the affected companies' support department, then it's time for you to move on to a different career.

    You're no longer in touch with your job description, and have forgotten exactly what it is that you're supposed to be doing for your company and your public.

    Is it my fault that your company may have shipped me a faulty unit, and that I find your performance-decreasing "fix" unacceptable?

    No.

    I simply ponied up my money to buy one of your products, in the good faith that it would work as it should.

    I understand that the problem may not have been directly caused by your company. Get over it. I bought the product from you, and you now have my money. Had I dealt directly with your suppliers for the components of my unit, then I would address them. However, I didn't; because of that, the ball is back in your court.

    I don't think that I'm being unreasonable. I am only asking to receive what I paid for in the first place - a fully working, fully performing product. To claim that I'm being narrowminded and petty is disingenuous at best. The unit's fault is not mine. It shipped this way, and no mishandling or maltreatment on my part contributed to it.

    So move on, AC. You've lost your perspective on your relationship with your customer base. I assure you that your management and the people you deal with on a daily basis can sense it.

  • Actually, there is a test available for the Visor. Check the website. Oh, and the IPO was last week. The fix is coming in July. Glad to see you have your facts straight.
  • Isn't this the kind of attitude that got Iomega knocked off the top of the pile?
  • I'm not so sure. IMHO if DRAM doesn't do the refresh, then refresh must be done by CPU. And if CPU must be awaken, then it shortens batery life. Am I missing something? Gokky
  • I called Handspring Customer Care after finding that my Visor Deluxe was affected. BTW, I was really glad to find a published bug because my Visor had crashed several times, necessitating a hard reset, sometimes resulting in lost data where I did not have a currently synched version of the data on my PC. Anyways, I spoke to one of the reps and found out that I did not have to wait until July for the patch to be released. I was able to request an RMA and they are shipping me a new Visor Deluxe. So, not only am I going to have a patched Visor sooner but it is also going to be in mint condition. :)
  • In a n minutes it is a 1-(1-1/8000)^n chance that you get an error. In two weeks (20160 min) it is a 92% chance. Calculations are (most probably) based on full memory. gokky
  • It seems reasonable for me. As stated in TRG's web pages it is about 1/8000 probability that something goes wrong (I suppose when RAM is full) at each refresh cycle. If you have only 1M of 8M used, than it is 1/(8000*8M/1M)=1/64000 probability that your data will be corrupted at the refresh cycle. And when we compute long term probability for let's say 14 days: 8M used: 1/8000 /cycle, 20160 cycles, 92%/14 days 1M used: 1/64000 /cycle, 20160 cycles, 27%/14 days to get *at* *least* *once* crash
  • I just purchased a IIIxe which I believe to be one of the faulty ones. Less than a week after purchasing it went into a crash/reset cycle that didn't seem to be prompted by anything. Luckily I had just backed up my data so I wasn't screwed when the Palm dropped everything. Luckily when I bought it (directly off the crate) at CompUSA - I opted for the $20 1 year warranty where they would replace it for free if **anything** happened. Needless to say - I will be walking into CompUSA today to get a replacement.
  • Of course if you happen to be away from your computer for two weeks in the wilds of British Columbia on a photo trek the fact that you lost all the exposure information you had stored when your palm locks up could be a bit irritating. Go ahead ask me how I know :(

  • Handspring: Of COURSE It's a Software Patch (Score:3)

    by EvlG ( 24576 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @02:42AM (#966449)
    Some of the /. posts complain about it being a Software patch to fix the Handspring problem. This is no surprise why?

    Palm has announced a fix for their affected units which requires flashing the Palm. This is a software upgrade. They aren't replacing units.

    Handspring has no flash memory. Instead, the OS is loaded into DRAM like everything else. Why? So that they can easily issue software patches to people that don't require flashing! Software patching to fix something like this is not only what Palm is doing, but also, one of the reasons why Handspring went with their design in the first place.

    There's absolutely no reason to complain that Handspring sucks because you have to software patch for this problem, and the patch will be coming out in July (July starts tomorrow people.)

    As for the Spriongboard modules some posters complained about, ya it sucks that relatively few have come out yet, but that was mostly because of the hardware partners overcommiting themselves. Handspring was left out to dry. Not to fear; for those of us paying attention to PC Expo, we know that a whole slew of modules were shown, and are slated for release Real Soon Now (TM).

    So, don't worry, Handspring owners. This software patch to fix a bug is BY DESIGN how Handspring intended this to work.
  • It sounds like it might be an issue with the way the OS interacts with the DRAM chip. That could be an issue with the firmware and the way it accesses the different chip if they changed DRAM chips from the first revision. If that is the case it might be easily fixed with a new ROM upgrade to handle the chip.

  • No probs with my PDA (Score:4)

    by malahoo ( 128370 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @02:48AM (#966451) Homepage
    I just meticulously checked the memory in my PDA... it's still all there, it's still college-ruled. The nice thing is that it's persistent, and though WORM technology and limited to 90 pages, once that runs out you just buy another spiral notebook...
  • Of course they'd make a software patch for it, if possible; that's much cheaper and more convenient for them.

    This is surprisingly common. Not so much with memory, but a lot of device drivers have code in to work around hardware bugs. Look at the Linux kernel config. There are a lot of options for chipset bug fixes.

    It's a shame that this didn't show up when either company should have been testing them,

    It only happens about once a week when the memory's almost full though. Even if the bug was spotted, its not an easily reproducable one.

  • Hey Rob! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Apply the patch to Slashdot. The palm III that runs it seems to be getting a bit full.
  • I've heard that the HotSync feature of 'spiral notebooks' is notoriously slow. That said, the stylus interface is far more effective than Palm's implementation. :-)
    John
  • EPOC is the best palm-top OS, it beats PalmOS and Windows CE (PocketPC) by a mile.

    And therefore is doomed to failure. Psion don't have the kind of marketing dollars that M$ and Ci$co have. Talent should be enough, but it never is, or else we'd all be using OS/2, Linux or GEOS PCs. One day people and corporations will buy according to quality rather than good marketing, but I'm not holding my breath (Fords outsell Volkswagens after all)

  • This is similar to Intel's FDIV fiasco. Palm is using a performance-damaging software workaround to cover faults in their hardware. I will not go along with this.

    Supposedly, only 3% of all recently made 8MB Palms are affected. This is a pretty small small scale problem. I don't see it as a big deal -- of course my Visor Deluxe passed its memory test with flying colors.
    :-)
  • Maybe the patch is a soft pad of Post-It Notes to use as replacement memory...

  • Fuzzy? (Score:1)

    by $olid ( 87124 )
    I wonder.. are they gonna use Fuzzy logic to retain lost memories? :)
  • The beeping is very annoying to me, but whats worse are the two people in the cubes on either side of mine, who are threatening my life right now. I've covered the thing up by grabbing a roll of paper towels and wrapping it up using about half the roll. I then threw it in a desk drawer. I can still hear the damn thing! As far as your memory question goes, I have the same. I think that's the normal amount. The Vx's never showed a full 8megs. There's some reason for this that I had read somewhere, but unfortunately I can't remember it.
  • I totally agree that the hardware should be fixed. Having Palm provide a "fix" that actually reduces the capability of the device is a sham in my opinion. I paid good money for 8 full megabytes and good battery life. I smell a lawsuit. Oh well if they were sold defective chips. Responsibility to the consumer starts with them; if they want to pass the pain onto the chip maker, that's their perogative.


    "I shoulda never sent a penguin out to do a daemon's work."
  • Actually, having first-hand experience (I have both a Palm IIIx and a Cassiopiea E115), the interface on PalmOS is MUCH nicer than WinCE's. Too many extraneous taps in WinCE. Granted, CE 3.0x's interface is much cleaned up over the original HPC's interface, but they still have a ways to go to get over the windows "desktop" metaphor.

    :wq!

  • Re:Justification for a Software Patch (Score:3)

    by kzinti ( 9651 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @05:46AM (#966462) Homepage Journal
    it does kinda make sense that they could supply a software patch which would check to see if there was faulty memory and, if there was, make an alteration to the OS to stop it from accessing that area of memory.

    Read the TRG FAQ. The patch has nothing to do with accessing "bad" areas of memory; in fact, the corruption doesn't even occur when the OS is running! The problem is the memory chip's faulty implementation of self-refresh mode used when the Palm is asleep. The patch changes the refresh mode used.

    --Jim
  • The DRAM chip is still being put into a power saving state - just a different one. There's no significant difference in the performance of the two from what I can gather. It's nothing like the performance hit of an FDIV hack.

    Paul.
  • Minor correction of myself, the .pdb relocation is read only, but it too, copies the DB into RAM.
  • I had one of those PDAs, and the memory on it was the worst I've ever seen. It was completely write-once! Once you used that section of memory, you could never use it again! No thanks.
    --
  • For us using TRGpro [trgpro.com], the update is already available [trgpro.com]. It also contains the ability to run directly from Flash as well as OS 3.5.1.
  • This is the secont time I feal my decition to get the IIIe saved me. Frist time was when I got what I belive to be a virue for my palm (it started to act realy strang and had a fatal exception ever 10 minutes) so I use the following 2 carateristics in the palm IIIe to my advantage, 1 no flash rom 2 after a minut with out batters all data is lost, so I backed up the palm with pilot-xfer and deleted all the .prc files keeping the pdb files and when to watch tv 30 minutes later put the batters back in and installed the pdb files, problem gone. and now this with the faulty memory. Yes I don't have to worry.

  • Severe Quality Control Problems (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30, 2000 @03:21AM (#966468)

    I've got to say that this is getting a little bit ridiculous. This is not very well-known, but some of the current Palm III XE units in stores are shipping with defective (improperly wired) cradles. That is, if you plug them into a Windows 95/98 machine, they will do all sorts of bad things, even lock up the computer. (No, this is probably not part of a Pro-Linux conspiracy on the part of Palm.) But the real kicker is that they have not issued a recall for these units, instead relying on the individual customers to call them up complaining of a non-functional cradle (in which case they send you a new one (one of the older grey ones)). Combine this with the RAM problems and it looks like Palm has some serious quality control problems on its hands.

    This is really not the way to build loyalty in their userbase.

  • So where exactly is that test program for the IIIxe? The FAQ points one to the faulty-DRAM support page, but there's no link on that page or the IIIxe-specific pages.


    Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
  • (since nobody else notices me, I better reply myself...)

    There's also a pretty good explanation of the fix at TRG's site. http://www.trgpro.com/support/faq_dram. html [trgpro.com] M.
  • "Although a recent computer "virus" affecting cell phones in Spain caused a stir, computer security experts say a more inviting target for bug authors in the near future will be hand-held computers. Hand-held devices are more vulnerable because they have memory that is readable and writable. Most run e-mail programs and there are more hand-held devices than cell phones with limited capability to surf the Web" www.digitalmass.com Score : -10

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