While we've known about that pesky Sprint Treo Pro delay for a few weeks now and that it had something to do with Sprint's certification process, up till now we had no idea exactly what was wrong.

According to PhoneNews, what is being fixed is that annoyingly low RAM that we've reported on previously and talked about in the Podcast.  In case you don't remember, the Treo Pro only has ~43 MB of free available RAM after a soft-reset, which is about 20 MB or so lower than its GSM cousin. 

HTC engineers have confirmed that the issue causing the continual delay of the Sprint Treo Pro lies in continuous ROM testing and certification to resolve a perpetual low free memory issue after many insiders discovered that the Treo Pro had ~40 MB of  free memory with no applications running, despite shipping with 256 MB of RAM.

Evidently the problem is this: The RAM on this device is on separate chips and Windows Mobile has problems recognizing this extra amount of memory – so it is physically there, just not being seen by the system. This mirrors some similar issues with HTC's Touch Pro (Verizon) and other original Touch devices, so it sounds very plausible.

At first, my initial assessment having used the device was that it wasn't too big of a deal. But with more extensive usage, I recanted on that notion: 40mb is too little for a 2009 device. Also, we should point out that the Treo Pro only has 128 MB of RAM (like the GSM version), not 256 MB. Although this begs the question: How does a device get so far in development without anyone noticing the extremely (and unusual) low amount of RAM? This isn't like some rare software bug but rather a standard and obvious device specification.  

Finally, we're getting word that some Sprint stores are getting re-stocked as we speak with new Treo Pros with the new ROM on board, so keep an eye out for those. Now if you don't mind, I'm going to get my Treo Pro packed and ready to send to the HTC gods ;-)

We have been talking about developing technologies for offering massive storage for mobile devices for 2 ½ years now in the "Flash or HDD? That's the Question thread".  Intel just announced a huge step in offering GBs for cell phones with their new Solid State Drive (SSD) that is smaller than penny and weighs less than a drop of water, according to their press release:  

The tiniest in the industry, the Intel® Z-P140 PATA SSD is designed for ultra-small mobile internet devices, digital entertainment and embedded applications and is part of the proposed Intel “Menlow” platform. The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD comes in 2 Gigabyte (GB) and 4GB densities, extendable to 16GB.

According to the Intel Product Brief this little SSD can hold its own with Read Throughput at 40 Megabytes / sec and Write Throughput at 30 Megabytes / sec and is tested with a Mean Time Between Failures at 2,500,000 hours (which if you are curious is 104,167 days... which is just over 285 years... which leads to... how in the heck did they come up with that?).

Today we are begging phone manufacturers to include at least 128 mb in any given phone and we willingly fall to our knees in praise when they put 256 mb of memory / storage in a phone.  Could you imagine the reality of having somewhere between a 2 GB to 16 GB of internal memory / storage on a phone be commonplace? Because we here at WMExperts can (and do).

When is this really going to be a reality?  I am not sure.  The Intel Fact Sheet does not come out and say specifically, but it does alludes to the possibility that it will be released with their proposed Menlow platform, which will be released to manufacturers sometime during the first half of 2008. Though, again, it's not clear that that the Z-P140 PATA SSD will be included with this first generation release of the Intel Menlow platform. 

All of which means that 2009 is probably the most optimistic projection for inclusion in GSM phones.  For those of us on CDMA networks here in the states, well, we'll probably be waiting another year after that for the typical catch-up and personalization phase (assuming, of course, that our CDMA carrier is even around anymore!)