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The Perils of Flash
The Bugs have hopefully been worked out, and now you can Flash your Treo yourself. Just remember to backup!
Not only that, it appears that the Flash ROM in the Treo will be used for the near future as the Treo 180/270 FAQ states:
" Q. Is the OS upgradeable?
A. Yes. We use flash memory in order to be able to provide updates such as GPRS capability. Handspring does not intend to provide incremental versions of Palm OS but we will issue updaters for the Treo communicators from time to time such as the GPRS update later this year."
(This supposedly was posted to the Treo FAQ when Updater 1.0 was released)
But, is using the Flash ROM really safe? As a warning if something happens where you cannot fix it, it is an out of warranty repair from Handspring - meaning charges of up to $170 to fix your Treo. Again, VisorCentral.com/TreoCentral.com will take no responsibility for whatever may happen to your device.
After talking with Brad Kish of Brayder Technologies, we have found that it is indeed safe - and if something does happen, you can fix it.
It is theoretically possible that when flashing the ROM of your Treo is that the operation could fail and end up corrupting the Flash. Due to the way that the Palm OS ROM is designed, it can always be restored with a hotsync cable and a backup of your ROM.
As Brad has said:
"Each ROM on a PalmOS device is divided into a Small ROM portion and a Big ROM portion. The Small ROM is the first 32 or 64K of the ROM and contains boot code and debugger. The Big ROM is the rest of the ROM and contains the OS and the Apps.
JackFlash, JackSprat and JackSafe are specifically designed to NEVER touch the Small ROM portion of the ROM. This lets us always recover a device if necessary.
(Which is rare to never)."
Another question about Flash ROM was if it could wear out. From the Toshiba Flash ROM chip's pdf guide, they list 100,000 erase/program cycle's as average before things might go wrong. As programs do not write to the flash while they are running, copying 100,000 files would be very hard!
In the long run, flashing your Treo appears to be safe, but the most important thing is to backup the ROM, and keep the backups. Jacksprat comes with a built in backup program to do this.
Users may need to restore their backup ROM to be able to upgrade their Treo to GPRS.
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