I just discovered a serious problem with the 650 phone power up sequence. I know this is a Sprint issue but not sure if it applies to GSM phones. But here it is:

If you enable the "Enable Local Network Time" option then this is what happens when the phone powers up:

1) 650 sets the 650's time to a random time (mostly in the 1980's from what I can tell)
2) 650 then resets the time to the correct local time.

This happens *every* time you power up your phone. Well it sounds harmless enough until you start to think about what this does to the operating system and running applications: setting the time backwards causes all pending alarms (system and application) to be killed. So programs that are trying to be nice about re-enabing themselves by setting alarms to wait for a period of time before they enable themselves after a reset will most likely not enable themselves because their alarms were dropped! any running program that reads the time will get a bogus date and potentially make bad decisions on what to do. Then when the time goes back to normal, that can confuse applications even more.

I believe this can also be the reason for some battery drain issues people are reporting. I can see how a program or a part of the operating system could grab this bogus date and go into a loop and spin for a long time consuming battery as it goes. Every time you manually powerup your phone you potentiall kill all pending alarms. I can see that it is also possible to corrupt data and files if a program happens to grab the bogus date and uses it as a part of its operations. I have seen my phone 3 times in the last day crash during the powerup and my clock was left on a date back in 1982!

I don't mean to alarm everyone but I think this is a searious problem that people need to know about. IMO this option needs to be disabled until a fix is distributed. As I reacll the 600 also had a problem early on this "Enable Local Network Time" but if I recall correctly it was a problem with not getting the right timezone set.

Jeff Gibson

Editor's note: the abovementioned problem seems to have been remedied in the Treo 650 Sprint Updater 1.12 ROM upgrade.

Rate this download: --10 - Best98765 - Average4321 - Worst 

If you were a registered user you could also submit your review for this download.