>>One reason is, PalmIIIe uses ROM memory, which could not be re-programmed
>>with software.
>Why not was meant to imply why could you not update portions of the ROM with
>a RAM patch. Its possible not all features could be updated, but it could
>be better than nothing.
Well, current devices don't have MMUs to swap out hunks of ROM, so the only
way to update things would be to patch traps, a la Hackmaster, and that
isn't always an efficient way to go about things. Plus it is quite a lot
of work.
Remember there are two types of upgrades that sometimes get lumped
together, but are quite different. There's the "small bug fix" patches
which are prcs, and result in OS version numbers like 3.0.1. Then there
are entire OS upgrades which replace everything, and thus can have tons of
bugs fixed, new functionality added, etc.
The first category is fine to do on a device with masked rom. The second
wouldn't - both because it'd suck up a ton of the user's memory, and also
that it wouldn't be possible to do a complete upgrade without a huge
investment of time and hacking and not everything would necessarily be
fixable that way anyway. The ROM does some important work before the trap
system is even set up, and even more before it gets around to looking at
what databases are installed.
Also we don't have engineers just sitting idle around here, wondering if
there's a way to hack some sort of functionality into an old device which
was intentionally created to be sold to folks who wouldn't be the types
that would do OS upgrades, and thus didn't want to pay extra for that
functionality... remember that the customers are nowhere near as tech-savvy
as everyone on this forum! Doing a flash upgrade on their device would
scare many normal people silly, and there are always folks who find a way
to mess up a "foolproof" upgrade...
-David Fedor
Palm Developer Support
