Treo 650 wifi
There have been a few reports about this guy finding the wifi drivers in the 650’s firmware image. He says the first character of all the filenames are missing, which reminds me a lot of what MSDOS used to do when it deleted filenames off of FAT filesystems. It sounds like someone deleted the drivers out of the firmware filesystem and didn’t think about the fact that it wouldn’t be wiped completely. In other words, it’s a complete accident, not an intentional disabling.
My personal prediction is that Palm doesn’t consider the wifi or BT DUN drivers to be production quality. I suspect this is why Sprint hasn’t pushed new BT DUN drivers and why Palm hasn’t mentioned the wifi drivers. People are saying that the unlocked GSM 650’s have BT DUN enabled, but I could easily see the CDMA version being slightly different, or Sprint wanting to roll out a limited number of firmware updates and waiting for some specific fixes before they do.
My guess is that Palm has to do most of the customizations for phones for the vendors, and that it’s mostly the same teams doing customizations as do development for the phone specific features. If that’s true, then they’re prioritizing opening up their market for the phone by getting it out to more vendors, and planning to open up BT DUN and wifi later. They probably figure it’s a fairly small portion of the market that will refuse to buy the 650 because it’s lacking wifi and DUN now, and they can pick up that market in 6 months when they release a new OS rev that officially supports them.
Of course, if they had released them in the current state, lots of people would be complaining that they don’t work as well as they would expect. You can argue that Palm should have more development resources and maybe they should, but things don’t always work out how you plan either.
Of course, I also can’t figure out why anyone would want wifi on the Treo. It seems like it would have to be a huge battery killer.
