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Handhelds Hardware

Handspring Hides Flash ROM in Handspring Treo 193

Posted by timothy from the plus-it-has-a-pot-of-gold dept.
miradu writes: "TreoCentral has just posted an intriguing article about how the Handspring Treo has Flash ROM - something that Handspring claims it doesn't. They've worked with Brayder Technology to create applications to utilize this newly discovered feature. It brings up the question, Why do developers lie about features in a device - especially if they are features that are wanted? Does anyone know any other examples?" Strange -- hardware manufacturers don't often underestimate their products' capabilities, do they?
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Handspring Hides Flash ROM in Handspring Treo More

Handspring Hides Flash ROM in Handspring Treo

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  • That one is easy (Score:5, Informative)

    by fidget42 ( 538823 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @07:07AM (#3885078)
    It allows them to remove the Flash at some point in the future and replace it with a cheaper ROM. If they don't tell you that they have a Flash, then you won't complain when it is removed. I would expect the next version to be missing the Flash.
    • For exactly the same reason I don't tell my employer I have a driver's license.
    • TreoCentral also offers this explanation and it explains why Handspring doesn't announce this feature. But TreoCentral also mentions, that it might cost about $5 per device to include the Flash-Rom. But Flash-Rom, and the ability to upgrade your OS is a great sales argument, so i wonder if the value-add isn't worth $5 (or probably a little more after taxes) to a lot of customers (this brings up the question, which market is their main target: the geeky folk who want a device they can upgrade when they want to, or the folks who don't want to be bothered with "complicated" updating-procedures).

      Also now that the information is out, that there are flashable treos available maybe Handspring better rethink their sales-strategy. If they now start producing treos without Flash-ROM a lot of folks will still try to get the flashable versions and pester salespeople about version numbers etc. and in general be dissatisfied with a treo that has this feature removed (and to them it makes no difference if Handspring anounced it as a feature or someone else).
      • Yes but if Handspring does not release a ROM update having it doesn't really do you any good does it?

        Joel
      • This is a false economy. Not only would I be more than willing to pay $5 for flash, but the lack of it will probably cost Handspring my business in the future.

        I own a Handspring Visor Deluxe now, and I'm quite happy with the machine and with Handspring's service. But I need to upgrade for two reasons: I'm starting to see apps I want that won't run under my current OS, and I read enough on the machine that I want a color version. Were Handsprings flashable, it would be a no-brainer.

        But I'm not only stuck with an out-of-date OS, I waste a lot of space with built-in apps I've long since replaced with better versions. So it's likely a Palm for me next time, and all over $5.
        • This is a false economy. Not only would I be more than willing to pay $5 for flash, but the lack of it will probably cost Handspring my business in the future.

          But look at it from the company's point of view. On the whole, whether or not they have flash or ROM isn't going to change the sales figures. Sure, a few of us care and won't buy something without flash, but the vast majority of the PDA-buying market neither know nor care about the difference. Net loss, a fraction of a percent of their market share.

          However, say the price difference between flash and a masked ROM is $5. (Not sure if this is accurate, but I know that masked ROM is cheap, cheap, CHEAP!) They're not likely to pass the savings onto the customer now, are they? The price is determined by the marketting department at what they think people will pay for the device, not what it costs to build. So the company will pocket the $5. Multiply that by the sale of 100,000 units, and you've made a cool half-million in extra profits. profits. Okay, let's say that 1% of your potential market is lost because they want flash. You've lost 1,000 sales. So your profit from using a masked ROM instead of a flash is only $495,000. Still sounds like using a masked ROM makes better sense.

          Okay, so why does the Treo have an unadvertised flash? Could be that they're planning to remove the capability in the next rev. Maybe they were rushing this design to market and didn't have the lead-time to get a masked ROM made. Maybe it was easier to manufacture with a flash instead of an EPROM. Substitutions get made all the time, often because the purchasing department finds a better deal on something.

          Case in point -- In a product I worked on, we had to add last-minute support for another manufacturer's flash because purchasing found a slightly better price from them. We had to add new drivers to the firmware, but that's a one-time engineering cost as opposed to a recurring cost on the bill of materials. Now we can manufacture the devices with whichever flash parts are cheapest. I can imagine the same argument holding true for using flash vs. ROM.

          (Although one time this sort of cost reduction came back and bit the company in the butt. We released a product with "just enough" RAM, because going to the next larger size chips would have added $1/unit to the bill of materials. The very next firmware release, marketting told us that they wanted all sorts of new features that weren't possible with the amount of RAM in the product. Sorry, you lost.)

          And do manufacturers understate the device's capabilities? You better believe it! We had two similar models. The actual advertised difference was that one had a high-quality long-life part, where the other had a cheaper shorter-life part instead. However, that wasn't enough product differentiation for the marketting team. They were afraid too many customers would buy the model with the cheaper part instead of the more expensive (and higher profit margin) model. So, they decided that the model with the cheaper part should run slower. The two units had the exact same CPU board, but we had to put in extra wait-states to slow down the code on the cheaper model. The two units even used the same code; we simply detected whether we found the cheap or expensive part, and programmed the memory wait-states appropriately.

          The moral of the story is, companies will do anything they can to make a buck. And the minds of marketting folks are often incomprehensible to us engineers, and vice-versa.

    • Well, maybe wrong is a little harsh. This is all opinion. I'd strongly say that the reason why though is that they don't want companies or people writing their own instructions on the ROM. After all, they strongly support PALM OS, and they wouldn't want to make it easier for people to migrate to other software.

    • Re:That one is easy (Score:2, Informative)

      by Troed ( 102527 )
      Exactly. It's very common to use flash in the first batch of a product, since that's just the continuation of testruns that of course had flash so you could iron out all bugs. The second batch usually has masked roms instead.

      (Experience from developing for handheld computers and cellphones is behind the above statement)

  • And option B... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @07:10AM (#3885082) Homepage
    This isn't _standard_ on all of the Treo's and is only used in certain manufacturing runs, so some of the things tried here could fail, or screw up the system you have. So in the specs they don't mention it as the use of FlashROM was down to a costing decision on a paticular run (maybe they bought in bulk to support other products, or had left over elements that could be incorporated).

    This is like assuming that just because one PC has a paticular motherboard with paticular tweeks that every PC has that.

    The Treo is still butt ugly mind.

  • Samsung i300 (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Jake ( 233010 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @07:10AM (#3885083)
    Users of the Samsung i300 for the longest time were told that there was no flash rom, and that the operating sytem was not upgradable.

    Then FlashPro came out and proved that there was flash in the i300.

    Upgrading the OS is still not an option, considering that there are lots of propreitary extensions to the OS.

    However, the flash capabilities of the devices were hidden for quite a while.

    Jake

  • long range vision (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cr@ckwhore ( 165454 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @07:12AM (#3885090) Homepage
    I think at least in Handspring's case, they've had a philosophy of planned obsolescense by building their products with hard ROMs.

    Obviously, they can't be upgraded that way, so in their all knowing marketing minds, they're hoping users will continue to upgrade to newer products from Handspring.

    Originally, they claimed that the lack of a flash ROM was a price saving measure, but I tend to think that in some cases, a flash rom would actually be cheaper.

    Now that the treo has a flash rom, and they're lying about it, what do they expect? Of course users are going to make use of that 'hidden feature' now!

    Handspring, you ought to 'embrace and extend' now that the gig's up.

    • Now that the treo has a flash rom, and they're lying about it, what do they expect?

      They are lieing about it? Didn't the article cite Handsprings on Knolage Base as saying more or less "sure, we have FLASH now, on some devices, but we don't promise to keep using it".

      I think that matches up with the truth.

      It may not be a good idea, but that doesn't make it a lie! (it also may be a good idea, if very few people would use the flash, it might be better to make $5 more per unit by switching to MROM and lose some of the people who would have used the flash...of corse if it were my choice I would pay the extra $5 because I would rather patch the OS in ROM then have a RAM patch that a hard reset can take out)

    • I think at least in Handspring's case, they've had a philosophy of planned obsolescense by building their products with hard ROMs.

      Obviously, they can't be upgraded that way, so in their all knowing marketing minds, they're hoping users will continue to upgrade to newer products from Handspring.

      I disagree. Handspring has always had aggressive pricing: for what you get, the price has always been very good.

      (And recently they have insane low prices on Visor products... probably because sales took such a big hit after Donna Dubinsky said Handspring would be exiting the organizer market. People don't want to buy an orphan product, so Handspring slashed prices to keep sales moving. Ironically, the Treo 90 makes it clear that Handspring has not, after all, decided to exit the organizer market! But Visor devices with Springboard slots are never going to see any new models.)

      I used to work for a manufacturing company. They were obsessed with Cost Of Goods. If a flash chip really costs $5 extra, it would totally make sense for Handspring to want to get rid of it. $5 additional cost of goods is probably worth $15 on the retail price; they can abosorb that now but down the road that's a lot.

      I paid $300 for my first Visor Deluxe. You can now get one new for $120.

      And, all that said, how many Handspring customers really care? I've never bothered to install an OS update on my Visor Deluxe; I haven't had any problems with it, so who needs it? Once the OS is stable, having it in ROM won't bother very many people.

      I, personally, would cheerfully pay $20 or more for a flash chip on my PDA. However, I'm a geek, and most people wouldn't choose to pay that much. And it would cost too much to produce two versions of each PDA (the flash version and the cheaper ROM version) and let customers choose.

      I wish they could put the ROM in a socket or something so it would be easy to swap in a flash chip. Alas that isn't going to happen on a tiny PDA device, even if it didn't add to cost and make the device potentially less reliable.

      I don't have a problem with what Handspring has done. But I might try to buy one of the "early" model Handsprings now that I know about this.

      steveha
  • ... ah fuck it.

    Back on topic: obviously, they planned to release a newer model at a later date - "Now with flash rom!" - ye ol' upgrade path to hell.
  • It has been my experience at least that companies regularly hide things I would consider features because they don't want to deal with customer support issues surrounding those features. This more often happens, so it seems, when the feature involved is either complicated or delicate (or both for that matter).
  • Sometimes Hardware (or Software) manufacturers include features that are either experimental or transient and they don't mention them because they don't want to provide support for those features. If it something that the system uses, but application software shouldn't, then they probably won't mention it in the specs.
    • I have to agree with this. For example, iTools is a service provided by Apple which includes mail at the @mac.com domain. They provide POP and SMTP however it was little known that IMAP was there all along too. A perfect example of a hidden feature.

      If it had been widely advertised support would have been a nightmare but they could have probably sold more disk space. But the bottom line was that people understand POP and they don't understand IMAP.
  • Let's say they announce it's got Flash ROM, then people start hacking it, then "standard" apps no longer work on people's PDA's, 'cause their OS has been whacked up. What do you get? Returns! And what does that hurt? Profits! And who has to pay to support this stuff? Not the users!

    If it was *designed* to be hacked with (*cough cough xbox cough*), then yes, Flash ROM would be a selling point. But it wasn't....

    BTW, for a while, I thought the story was about a kerfuffle between Macromedia and the PDA people. =)
  • It isn't all that uncommon for automotible manufactures to underrate the performance of engines in cars, or cpu manufactures to underestime the chips that they market as x Ghz.
    • yeah i love al of those japanese cars with exactly 276hp, when they really rate at like 350hp. i specificly thinking of the Mazda RX7, the Nissan Skyline (R34, etc) and the Toyota Supra.

      although this is caused by the japanese government placing a hp cap at 276hp, because you would never need more than that, ahem 640k, ahem, aahem. but the japanese gov. trusts the automakers and does no actual testing so twin turbo Supras would roll off the line pushing like 350-400hp.

  • they aren't publicizing it possibly because their licenses for the palm os don't allow upgrades. I don't know the whole issue behind licensing and whatnot, but I think I remember something about it being cheaper for them to go the ROM route and not offer upgrades per device, but the buying in bulk issue is also a possible one, perhaps more likely.

  • Why? Support (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Your_Mom ( 94238 ) <slashdot@@@innismir...net> on Monday July 15, 2002 @07:29AM (#3885145) Homepage
    It brings up the question, Why do developers lie about features in a device - especially if they are features that are wanted?
    Easy, one word: Support. I am quite sure that Handspring doesn't feel like supporting a million handsping Treo's where their users downloaded the lastest PalmOS upgrade that theire neighbor used on their m 505 and burnt out thier Treo. I am reminded of the PA cartoon where nintendo has to support GBAs when peoepl try to install the Portable Monopoly sytem.


    Maybe they planned to tell us later, maybe its a fluke and is only in certain models. Who cares?
  • On the original Rev.A iMac, Apple included what was known as a "mezzanine" slot. While Apple never used this slot for anything, some people did. I believe someone even rigged up a floppy drive into it. (This was before the HUGE boom in bondi blue USB peripherals)
    • not positive if we're talking about the same thing, but the rev. A iMacs had a slot that resembled a PCI slot very closely, and i believe it was infact one. you could buy an aftermarket voodoo 2 banshee for it, i believe, that really made the video fly on those old iMacs. apple got wind of this and shut them down almost as fast as they shut down griffin and their iPod-turned IR tv remote control mod (which would be bad ass, and a good reason to buy an iPod....oh well)

      • Can you substantiate the charge about Griffin Technologies? It is interesting to read their press release [griffintechnology.com] for a product that they clearly don't ship. What makes you certain that this was withdrawn due to pressure from Apple and not due to a more innocent reason?

        • the best i can say is that i heard it on a mailing list for tibooks, of all things. i can't seem to find the actual email currently, but the person who mentioned it originally didn't have anything backing his statement up....call it a rumor.
      • not positive if we're talking about the same thing, but the rev. A iMacs had a slot that resembled a PCI slot very closely, and i believe it was infact one. you could buy an aftermarket voodoo 2 banshee for it, i believe, that really made the video fly on those old iMacs. apple got wind of this and shut them down almost as fast as they shut down griffin and their iPod-turned IR tv remote control mod (which would be bad ass, and a good reason to buy an iPod....oh well)

        The Voodoo2 card (not Voodoo Banshee) was made by MicroConversions and publicized as much as they could, so Apple "getting wind of it" is a somewhat misleading characterization - this was a product (the iMac GameWizard) sold openly and advertised, not some secretive hack like a blue box that was sold on the QT. Apple didn't kill the product (though they did remove the "mezzanine" slot from iMacs sold from January '99 on); MicroConversions went out of business for a number of reasons (customers sort of rebelled against the company for its high prices and unsatisfactory driver support). IIRC, another company bought up unsold iMac GameWizard inventory and continued to distribute them; I believe they even announced intentions to continue manufacturing them, although I'm not sure whether these plans ever went through. The market for them (gamers with early iMacs) is finite and fairly small, so I wouldn't expect the cards to continue to be manufactured forever anyway.

    • Yup. The 3Dfx voodoo2 card [theimac.com] (MicroConversions GameWizard) I installed in the mezzanine slot really extended the life of my computer. It's a shame Apple dropped it from the Rev.C onwards (IIRC). Maybe the company wouldn't have gone bust and we might even have had up-to-date drivers for it. Yeah, in my dreams...*sigh* :-P
  • Maby they discovered it was succeptable to those things. And it was too late in the product cycle to change it(the duh answer is to add a fysical jumper to protect from flashing). So they just shut up about it.

  • I've never used a treo, but I have had several Palms over the years. While all models had Flash Memory, the only way to use it directly with the stanard palm distribution tools was though a hot sync with a ROM Upgrade direct from palm. I have a samsung I300(other palm phone). This phone does not allow regular upgrades from palm because it has custom mods to the OS which are basicly extenions to allow the phone and Palm to talk to each other. In other words sence Samsung, will not update the OS there are no upgrades and no way to use the Flash ROM without aftermarket solutions. The Treo is likly the same. Handspring probly doesn't want to provude tools to use the flash memory, so it tries not to let people know its there.
  • According to the same article, Handspring had been putting Flash Roms in Platinum, Prism, and Edge, so it comes with not much suprise that Treo has flash rom as well.

    They probably mananged to get themselves a better deal from the flash rom people so they sticked flash instead.

    Another explanation would be that features such as 3G and email alert requires space off the ROM instead of your memory.

    Don't get too exicted just yet since non of the PalmOS devices today are OS5 capble, the flash rom is for extra storage for now, before Handspring've decided to use them all for patches and additional features etc.

  • VW does this with their cars (Score:4, Interesting)

    by qurob ( 543434 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @07:49AM (#3885219) Homepage

    Take a look at the cars with the 1.8 Turbo engine.

    By changing the ECU programming, they can add power by adjusting boost pressure, air/fuel/spark maps...

    The car can magically gain 10-20hp between model years, all with the click of a mouse.

    Aftermarket ECU tuners can get the same results out of the cars that are just a few years older.

    But, "15 more HP than last year" is a great selling point for a car.
    • Actually, if you look at the 1.8t in the 2001 models (150 hp), the first half have the original 150hp engine/turbo, and the second half have the newer turbo unit (same as the 2002s) with a litte boost removed to achieve the same 150hp.

      The original 150hp models can be easily and safely modded to 170-180 hp, while the new 170/180 hp models (depending on which car it comes in) can be fairly easily modded to 200-220hp via a new ECU.

      The first VW 1.8t (150hp in the Passat ~1998) was rougly the same engine as the 170hp 1.8t in the A4... no sense in having a premium car brand if you don't distinguish it in numerous ways.
    • Well, it's not that simple.

      I used to drive a 90bhp VW Golf TDI model '97, when there was a 110bhp available as well. It wasn't just the electronics set lower, it was also some parts in the engine that had a higher quality, for example tubes that can sustain more pressure.

      Take the latest S3 model from Audi, for example. At 210bhp, it has a 1.8T just as the Audi A3 @ 180bhp has. It's not only the electronics that have been finetuned, as I read somewhere in an advertisement for chiptuning that can bump up the 210bhp to about 235bhp.

      And here's another reason:

      Car manufacturers make cars for a wide market, especially European car manufacturers. Fuel is not the same quality in all countries as standards are set differently, and they just need to make sure that the car performs almost the same in all countries.

      Dave

    • And then amazingly in 2 years your engine fails! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sheldon ( 2322 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @10:52AM (#3886280)
      Do you seriously thing that an automaker would advertise their engine as having only 140 hp if with a small software change they could get 160 hp? I mean come on.

      No, they spec the engines out based on a number of factors relating to emissions, fuel economy and reliability. So by tweaking you adjust the compromise. Automakers do refine engines over time to gain more power, but they try do so in ways that don't effect it negatively. By that I mean, decreasing reliability or not allowing the car to meet US regulations regarding emissions and fuel economy.
    • BMW claims their 2001-02 M-Roadster does 0-60 in 5.0 seconds. Mine does 0-60 in well under that (I don't have a good way to measure it precicely, but I've driven enough sports cars to have a good idea). The various auto mags that have run their own test place it between 4.5 and 4.75 secs. Why would BMW understate the performance so significantly? So that it doesn't cut into sales of the higher-priced M3 Convertable and the much higher-priced (and actually slower) Z-8....
  • This way the vast majority of people that screw with their flash RAM will actually know what they're doing, or at least what they're risking.

    Personally though I've never seen the need to use the built-in flash RAM on my TRGpro, since I have a (*gloat*) 128MB CF card.

  • It might be that they didn't want to include all of the necessary control for flash programmin in their system. With flash (maybe its just the kind I work with) you cannot write to or read from a single address. You are restricted to sectors, and have to erase (make all 1s) a sector before writing to it again. This involved plenty of control, and if they gave the user's access to the flash they would have to make sure that certain sectors were protected and that they're internal apps didn't cross over any sector boundaries. Sure this is probably a good software engineering practice in general, but sometimes more trouble than its worth when you are simply conscerned with getting your product out as quickyl as possible.

  • My favorite quote (Score:5, Funny)

    by mdahlman ( 306918 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @08:06AM (#3885279) Homepage
    My favorite quote from the article:
    I ask all these rhetorical questions for a reason: I want to know what you think.

    er... you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

  • Its the history (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mjstrom ( 244211 )
    When the Visor first came out Handspring made a point about how they didn't use Flash ROM in the device and how that was a cost saving to the consumer (ie made the device lower priced). They made a big deal about it in their marketing materials.

    Now, what happens when they reverse their position?
    • Also, the Visor's OS couldn't be upgraded. At all. I've still got one of the original Visor units on me right now and I'm still running PalmOS 3.1.

      If they had Flash ROM in the Visor and the OS could be upgraded then a good chunk of the people would screw it up - the Visor is not a venerable machine. If people screw it up then they will call in and then Visor is on the phone forever with the average end user talking them through flashing the ROM, upgrading the OS, rolling back to the previous version or - worst case scenario - being liable for the data they lose. Handspring doesn't want this so they don't make the ROM flashable and they end it right there. The amount of money they save in potential support gets passed to the consumer.

      Plus the Visor was something of a "first step" system - most people want to upgrade to a new hardware unit eventually.

  • Strange -- hardware manufacturers don't often underestimate their products' capabilities, do they?

    ALWAYS. Ever hear of overclocking?
    And not just computer hardware, but pretty much anything built is tested PAST the point that it's good for.
    If your car's guages tell you it redlines at 6500 rpm, it probably really redlines at 7000. If an elevator says "20 People Max" it really means 30 or 40. etc.
    • I think there's a reason for underetimation in those cases...it's called safety and reliability. Would you want to get on an elevator loaded with 39 people when on the door it says 20 people max? Manufacturers calculate downwards on capacity to take into account variations in material tolerances. Sure the elevator might support all those people, but what if the day the spun the cables for it they happened to use some slightly weaker cable. It might have been within in the manufacturers specified tolerances, but it might reduce the load capacity.

      The specifications manufacturers provide are generally that capacity at which they gaurantee their product to perform. Sure, some product samples may perform beyond those specs, but then others may fail immediatly after they are exceeded. Just because of variations in manufacturing.
    • The reason elevators/car gauges work that way is to allow a safety "buffer" zone. If your tests indicate the elevator can hold 30 people, you say 20, because you *KNOW* you'll be fine. Because i the elevator just happens to fall on the 21st person, guess who the lawyers come after? Te elevator designer. Same thing for people who burn their engine out at 6501 RPM.

      It's standard engineering practice to leave a margin of error for safety reasons for things like cars, bridges, elevators etc.

    • If an elevator says "20 People Max" it really means 30 or 40.

      I was always under the impression that elevators were designated this way to account for... um... caloricly challenged people. I would feel much better about getting on an elevator with 20 super models than getting on one with 20 people leaving an overeaters anonymous meeting (ignoring the obvious issue of overlap between these two groups).

    • Actually passenger elevators typically have a safety factor of around 10. So when it says 20 people max, the cables won't actually break unless you somehow squeezed 200 people in there. But that's because if the cables break, people could die. Most computers aren't like that.

  • Palm OS licensing issue perhaps? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by topham ( 32406 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @08:25AM (#3885347) Homepage
    Whats the chance they license Palm-OS on a reduced rate because it isn't 'upgradable'?

  • Some Earlier Examples (Score:5, Interesting)

    by twisty ( 179219 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @08:39AM (#3885392) Homepage Journal
    > Strange -- hardware manufacturers don't often underestimate their products' capabilities, do they?

    It's common for the aspirations of engineers to be lobotomized a little by the larger marketting beast. I've read several articles on the web where a Celeron motherboard could be greatly sped up by placing celophane tape over a single pin of the Celeron's card edge connector. But then we stray into the area of overclockers...

    THE EARLIEST EXAMPLE that springs to mind is on Radio Shack's TRS-80 Color Computers. There was some story about doubling the RAM by bending two pins on a socketted IC chip. The story was that the onboard capacity was crippled for the sake of easy in-store upgrades.

    • Re:Some Earlier Examples (Score:4, Informative)

      by alienmole ( 15522 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @10:19AM (#3886016)
      That might be the earliest example in the "PC" industry, but IBM was much earlier - they used to (perhaps still do) charge big bucks to perform "upgrades" on customer mainframes by enabling hardware that was already in the machine.

      Mainframes would ship with various disabled features. Remember these were room-size devices (well, multiple large cabinets which would fill up a big room). When the customer wanted an upgrade, an IBM technician would be sent out, he would rearrange some jumpers, enabling a feature, and the customer would receive a bill for e.g. $100,000 for a memory upgrade.

      IBM made no apology for this: you were charged for the functionality you received, and the fact that the "upgrades" already existed inside the boxes in your computer room was irrelevant.

      So perhaps one can blame IBM for having started the ball rolling on the idea of strong control of "intellectual property" by the vendor... I wonder if anyone back then "hacked" their own mainframes?

      • The worse case I came accross was a printer from IBM. They had two models. One printed at 60 cps the other at 120 cps. The only difference between the two was a soldered in short. You could pay IBM to upgrade your slower printer. The engineer would show up and snip the solder. You now had doubled your speed. The engineer had no fear of showing me this, because he knew my employer would never let us perform this simple operation ourself.
      • So perhaps one can blame IBM for having started the ball rolling on the idea of strong control of "intellectual property" by the vendor... I wonder if anyone back then "hacked" their own mainframes?

        Er, "their own mainframes"? Surely you know IBM did not sell mainframes for an extreamly long time, just rent them. Sure it was in your machine room. You had to supply power and cooling, and your own experts to run it...but IBM still owned the machine.

        I don't know exactly then the practice stopped (I'm not old enough to have gotten in on more then the tail end of the mainframe's era of supremicy...and Amdahl had been around for a while by the time I knew anything!). I'm guessing very late 70s, but more likely the early 80s.

        By the way, I think Sun is currently doing this with their high end machines now. Of corse they advertise it. Interesting policy.

        • IIRC, Sun is doing this with their E10K servers. They are advertising it as a bonus -- easy processor upgrades! But I have been told -- in fact, by Sun Tech Support guys -- that this was because Sun couldn't get the bus density up to where they wanted it by socketing the CPUs on the motherboard. So they just soldered 'em on, and make you pay for them when you want them.

          I have also heard -- from less reputable sources -- that Linux/Sparc will use all of the CPUs on an E10K, regardless of what you've paid for.
    • THE EARLIEST EXAMPLE that springs to mind is on Radio Shack's TRS-80 Color Computers. There was some story about doubling the RAM by bending two pins on a socketted IC chip. The story was that the onboard capacity was crippled for the sake of easy in-store upgrades.

      Hmm. If this is what I think you're referring to, that's not quite true. (You may be referring to soemthing I hadn't heard about, of course.)

      What Tandy did do with the early CoCo 2 series was to take 64K memory chips that had tested with one or two bad bits, grab a set of them that were all bad in the same half of memory, then sell the result as a cheap 32K machine. Because of the way the Microsoft BASIC ROMs were mapped into memory, you couldn't use more than 32K of RAM under BASIC anyway.

      Side note: because of the way dynamic RAM is arranged with row and column addresses, DRAM chips will always have an even number of address bits. So nobody ever made 32K chips (which would require 15 address bits).

      Soon enough 64K chips became dirt cheap anyway, so there was no point in using bad ones; it was still cheaper to use 64K chips than twice as many 16K ones for a 32K computer. And besides, the CoCo 2 motherboard didn't have enough memory sockets to use 16K chips. The 'extra' 32K was only useful if you were running something like Flex09 or OS-9; OS-9 being a real-time multi-tasking operating system written for the 6809 processor, and available for the CoCo back in the early to mid eighties.

      So it wasn't a matter of 'easy in-store upgrades'; it was a matter of it being a lot cheaper to build that way.

      -- Bryan Feir
  • Handspring have a flash rom on the treo because the current rom has bugs and they want the ability to update it. There's already been a flash update for early Treo 180 models. Once they iron out the bugs, they'll burn it in a masked rom for new models, and save money.

    There is no space for user apps on the rom by default, the OS takes up all 4MB, but you can delete the foreign language apps to free up space

    The rom is a toshiba type

    There is 2MB (maybe 3MB, I forget) of flash on the mobile radio too.

    Handspring have always admitted to having a flash rom, but do not support any utility which modifies it, the article is in one of their knowledge-base pages.

    There probably won't be any major Palm OS upgrades in the foreseeable future, and almost certainly not for the Treo. Palm OS 5 won't run on it.
  • Rather than simply invent a new model, they could bargin out the old one, and give an extra boost, by claiming to have installed a Flash ROM for your convenience.

    Same product, new label; and since they never promised that the old one has a Flash Rom you can't feel cheated when you open the box of your new handspring, only to find it eerily similar to the one you already had.

  • So tell me IF they hadn't got flash ROM's in them how the heck would the software upgrade to enable GPRS work then?

    Answers on post card :-)

    Yes the Visors don't have flash ROM's but the treos have. That;s one of the nice things about them.
    • PalmOS lets you put OS patches in RAM that apply to the ROM - this is how they patched the non-Flash ROM in the original Visor. This technique is also used by Palm because the binary patches are easily removed, unlike a full upgrade.

  • Hardly unheard off (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @08:58AM (#3885476) Journal
    Happens all the time. CPU's are one extreme example. Early Intel celerons had the hidden capacity to be used in a multi processor setup. This was only changed when Intel noted that a lot of users where opting to buy two dirt cheap celerons rather then the overpriced PII(I) they wanted you to buy. Same with overclockin. It is easy enough to accomplish with an AMD chip, don't have Intel myself anymore so couldn't say, but AMD sure as hell ain't telling users about it. I started my IT career on the PROGRESS platform, RDMS and 4GL in one. Their monitoring tool had a "secret" section I only learned about when a rep visitid for some testing.

  • Why do developers lie? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bigfishbowl ( 528934 ) on Monday July 15, 2002 @09:08AM (#3885533)
    >Why do developers lie about features in a device
    The developers of the hardware usually aren't the ones who are lying. I work for a fairly large company [ti.com] and I can safely tell you that the engineers (that's me) don't sit around and plot to hide features. The way it usally goes down is that some guy in marketing gets a hold of technical documentation that is being developed along with the product. Once he gets it, he gives us a call and starts asking if feature so and so should really be documented. One thing is for certain though, marketing seems to get the final say as to what gets published and what doesn't.

    The corperate benifit of some of this stuff is fairly easy to see. For instance, say we make a chip called the Wizbang 3900. Now, this chip is going to be released in the 3901, 3903 and 3909 flavors each with different features. Since a run through the fab can cost upwards of $500k, it is much easier to just make one version, then just label them differently. The same thing is true with the development boards. A lot of times the board is only populated with the parts to allow that feature set. By populating more/different parts of the board, different features can be achived with out requiring a different board spin. All of this saves money and development costs, but does lead to some documentation holes.

    So in short, blame it not marketing not the engineers. We're the good guys.

    • The developers of the hardware usually aren't the ones who are lying.

      Agreed! I've seen that happen more than a few times. Thought it might be useful to add another possible reason why some features are hidden.

      My expertise is with software (20+ years in QA), not hardware, but I've seen the hiding of features happen several times. In my experience, the develpment cycle starts off with marketing making its pitch for what needs to be in the product release, and development pushes back with what is feasible in the time frame, as well as what they would like to do. There's some negotiation, and then development goes off to "do their thing". And all is happy and good.

      Then QA appears and does its thing. Sometimes QA is called in right from the start; other times the product is almost ready for release and someone thinks it might be good to have QA look at it before it is shipped tomorrow. I actually have seen a few projects released on time, under budget, and with the promised capabilities. But, that is sadly the exception rather than the rule. Even with an early participation by QA, there are often far more developers at work than QA people. The number of possibilities goes up exponentially, and there's just not enough time to test everything as it is developed. Design errors and implementation errors are found. Rework is required. Deadlines loom. All is not as happy and good as it once seemed. And then it happens.

      Maybe it's a nasty memory leak that builds up over time. Maybe there's a variable that gets corrupted, eventually. And there's not enough time to isolate it and fix it. So, instead of yanking out all the questionable code (which would introduce its own bevy of problems), the common approach is to just remove access to it (e.g. removing a choice from a pull-down menu) and, of course, removing all reference to it in the documentation.

      So, there's quite possibly some hidden functionality in a program (or a piece of hardware), but it was hidden for a reason. If you're a bleeding-edge kind of person, go have fun. In light of your particular circumstances, it might well seem to work okay. But, if you need to be able to rely on the application or system, it might be a Really Good Idea(TM) to use only the documented features. You might miss out on some helpful features, but you might also save your butt.

      • But, if you need to be able to rely on the application or system, it might be a Really Good Idea(TM) to use only the documented features. You might miss out on some helpful features, but you might also save your butt.

        Darn! You mean I shouldn't be using the hidden "overclocking" option I found on my pacemaker? But I feel so alive with my heart going at a steady 180bpm all the time!

  • I vaguely recall US Robotics doing something like this with their early Sportster modems a few years ago. IIRC, you could turn your $250 Sportster 14.4K into a $400 Courier Dual Standard (HST!) 16.8K by sending a command string that flipped a switch in the firmware and enabled the Courier code. I tried to find a page on it, but the best I was able to do was a few messages archived in Google groups. [google.com]

    Do hardware manufacturers understate the capabilties of their products? I guess the answer is "All the time, man. All the time."
  • First of all, it's not the developers who lie most likely, but that's just nitpicking. It's probably the marketing people.

    But anyway, they probably lie for the same reasons that Microsoft disabled OS calls necessary for a bootloader to function.

    ***They don't want you to boot PalmOS, or WinCE, or whatever off the device and install something else.***

    I'm not into MSoft bashing, but even I can't deny this one. They did it, plain and simple. And now it appears that Handspring may be using similar tactics.

    I know it sucks for those of us who like to install alternative OS's on our PDAs, but on the other hand, I can also understand why it doesn't really fit into their business model.

    Just think of it as Ford welding their cars' engines in place, so you couldn't easily swap the engine for a different one.

    If you want to easily use an alternative OS on your PDA, here's the best options in no particular order, IMO:

    Ipaq
    Zaurus
    Agenda VR-3
    Old WinCE device and NetBSD

    THere are probably others, but it's too early to think.

    • > ***They don't want you to boot PalmOS, or WinCE, or whatever off the device and install something else.***

      I really doubt it's Handspring being a big meanie and not letting you use the unit any way you wish. It's almost certainly a contractual constraint in their license of Palm's OS.

      To identify the bad guys, look to the OS manufacturer.

  • This article [treocentral.com] on TreoCentral is even more interesting.. They did a review with pictures of the Treo 300.. That's the Sprint CDMA Model.. Wish they had some more info on when it will be available, since this is the one that I'm waiting for..

  • Another example: DEC's microVAX (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    After the development of the VAX (1977-78 with large wire wrapped boards), VAXes on chips were developed (early to mid 80s), a small system was eventually developed: the microVAX. It had two bus board expansion slots (a proprietary DEC bus - was it Q-bus?) originally. The platform was wildly popular and sold well, yet they wanted to sell even more. They tried to do so by cheapening down the box and lowering the sale price. One thing they did with the cheaper version of the microVAX was to provide only one bus expansion slot, keeping the price point for the two bus slot system higher. The cost to re-tool the box fab plant would have been rather high, hence for the cheaper box the same mother boards were used and the second bus slot was filled in with epoxy rendering it unusable. Some enterprising customers, with access to chemical stockrooms filled with appropriate epoxy solvents, found that with a bit of dissolving, scraping, and cleaning; the cheaper microVAX could be made to have two bus slots just like its more expensive older brother. The VAX hardware hack went down in history as a legend.
  • It's an easter egg!
  • If it's a copy protection workaround of course they lie. That's why they're called "devices".

  • When a product is designed, especially when the product is part of an evolving line of similar products, the product may contain bits of technology that are there to test various design points or manufacturing methods. While these are part of the product, if the features these technology pieces provide are not advertised, then the manufacturer has no duty to provide support for them.

    Support is one of the most costly items in a products lifecycle. I remember a statistic (I can't quote the source) that 50% of the cost of software is in the support and maintainance of it after release. I would venture that Handspring has looked at what it would take to support this feature and decided that there is not enough margin in the product to support it even if the capability is provided in the hardware.

    A final thought, they may have discovered some sort of performance or reliability problem with the flash ROM and instead of correcting the problem (potentially quite costly), they removed the feature so they did not have to support it.

    -tpg.

  • Old Fogey's (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Late 70's/Early 80's Techtronics used to ship
    the 4014 Storage Tube Terminal. To convert it
    to a 4015 you paid some big bucks to Techtronics
    and a technician came out and clipped a couple
    of wires to enable the additional features.

    TI's TI-58/59 calculators had undocumented
    instructions that were useful in getting
    programs smaller (Direct access to processor
    stack). (1977?)

    Undocumented/Denied features have been going
    on for years. Why be surprised ?
  • The TI-83+ Silver Edition (graphing calc) has approximately 96KB more memory than the standard TI-83+. However, Texas Instruments doesn't allow the user to access this extra memory through the OS, although there are a few programs that use it for certain features. (See VirtualCalc on ticalc.org if you're interested and/or disbelieve me.)

    Hopefully, they'll make this memory usable in a future OS version, but I kinda doubt it.
  • The original iMac had a so-called Mezzanine slot [macworld.com] that allowed people to upgrade the iMac's paltry 2megs of ATi Rage (iirc) video. The revision B iMac no longer had the slot soldered in, but still had the place on the motherboard -- and some companies offered to solder in a slot so you could install video card upgrades (the Voodoo 2 was the only one I'm aware of, but that was a big upgrade, esp in 1998).

    Apple didn't exactly deny the slot was there, but they weren't too excited to show it off (it's not in the iMac Rev. A's specs page [apple.com]) -- they made a pretty concerted effort to make sure people knew the slot wasn't supported. Wasn't long until the motherboard was changed and the slot was gone completely. Funny to think they were probably only saving a few cents to take the soldered slot off the mobo for Rev. B, but 2 times a million iMacs starts to add up!
  • If flash is inside my treo under cover, its obviously because ming the merciless is in there trying to take over the earth. Now that you've let the cat out of the bag ming will find out... oh well, time to switch allegiences. Hail Ming. Hail Ming. (you can marry my girlfriend if you like, as long as you give me a planet or something)
  • Has anyone thought that this was intentional? Perhaps they didn't document it because they wanted to leave it there for future OS upgrades, patches, and other things.

    If users install applications into this flash space, Handspring can't upgrade or patch the OS using this flash space. Now the number of support calls quintuple, because users flashed applications into this space (violating their warantee, I might add).

    I see nothing at all wrong with what they've done, and it happens all the time in electronics.

  • I've noticed from time to time a "feature" is burried and said to not exist becouse it's not supported in the typical way.

    PalmOs provides some support for flash rom and no doupt the Handspring units lack that support.
    There are some good reasons for not announcing this fact.

    I've noticed on my Handspring Visor while I have 2 meg memory it's actually 2 meg total memory.. including the rom. This could be Handspring goofing around and giving less ram to cut costs. But I doupt they could easly do that.
    More likely the rom was copied to ram. This is a trick to speed things up a tad done on some PCs.

    If Handspring dose this will ALL the devices they sell then the flashrom would automaticly be cut off when it wasn't needed anymore.

    It makes sense to me. Handspring provides software updates from defects in PalmOs on older visors. Yet they don't have flash. This suggests to me that the patch is being done in ram and not to the rom itself.
    This also suggests that if you hard reset the unit your patch is vaperised. A good thing when you think about it... Viruses? Yeah you remember those. Palm isn't evil like Microsoft but they aren't totally benine. Just as evil as Kelloggs.. (Or do you believe coco puffs are actually a healthy breakfast? I don't.. Never did.. not even as a kid.. Good to expose kids to obveous marketting lies)

    So basicly yeah it may be there but just not supported enough to tell the costummer.
    The'd expect it to be supported in the usual ways and when it's not they'd be pritty angry.

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