Treo 750 Disaster

This weekend disaster struck on Labor Day. My phone had been acting funny for 7-10 days, freezing more than I had been used to, primarily while on power and after going into sleep (blank screen) mode. During the preceding week things were getting worse, with freezes while live. I put this all down to software (MemAid? Opera Mini beta?) and resolved to do some research. Thursday, as I was returning, the phone froze in the plane when I turned it on to call up my daughter, who was picking me up at the airport. When I did a soft reset, the phone decided to do a hard reset, and all sorts of other problems occurred. Next day I was able to get the phone working again, after carrying out a couple of hard resets, soft resets had stopped working. Part of the problem is that when the soft resets stopped working I was essentially unable to to a restore (or backup), because Sprite Backup does a reset before and after any activity :-(.

The next, disastrous, step was that the phone refused to cycle through the hard resets. I was able to do a hard reset, but it just stuck somewhere in the initialization process. Tuesday morning I called AT&T immediately, who were not able to offer any help as they told me I was out of warranty. I contacted Palm, through their Live Chat support and has handed off to the phone support group. While they could not help me, they did indicate that their records showed that I was still in warranty, because of that fact, they could not arrange an exchange repair, I had to return to AT&T for that. When I called AT&T, I was told that I was indeed out of warranty, by one week! If I had called a week earlier, my phone would have been exchanged for free, now it would cost me $399 for a refurbished model, more for a new one! begging and pleading with AT&T had no effect, even when talking to their retention department, where I was transferred immediately when I asked how much my Early Termination Fee would be (as offset against the cost of a replacement phone with AT&T, compared to taking a new line at one of their competitors) :-( :-(

However, before taking that final step I decided, as my phone was pretty much worthless, I might as well try to re flash the ROM. This was because I had a gut feel that the reset freezes might be due to a corrupted ROM. I am not too sure how that can happen, but as the phone's ROM can be flashed I guess it can be corrupted too.

Unfortunately I had lost the flash software which I had used a number of months earlier to upgrade the phone from WM 5.0 to WM 6.0. However, even if I had it, it would not have helped as it was designed to be loaded via a sync connection. And as my phone would not reset, no sync. I knew that there was an alternative method to flash the ROM, using an SD card. So using good old Google I manged to find the necessary software. I used a spare mini-SD card, loaded the software and then used the particular key presses to start the ROM flash procedure. It took about 10 minutes, and much to my surprise and relief....it actually worked. I have a fully functional phone again!

On the same forum where I found the 6.0 ROM (xda-developers), I also saw postings about upgrading the Treo 750 to run WM6.1. As I now had a way back to WM6.0 I decided to try it out. It was not as easy as the instructions indicated, but I did finally manage to load something that looked like WM6.1 on my phone. Unfortunately I discovered that firstly my data connection stopped working, and then shortly afterwards the initially working phone connection also stopped . So I had to drop back to WM6.0, but it works and I just saved myself having to buy a $399 replacement phone. Now I can wait until AT&T add the Treo pro to their line-up, and my contract is up (April next year). or maybe by then I can go for a new HTC Touch HD.