Referring to the nice guide at Treonauts, I finally upgraded my Treo 650’s firmware to the 1.20 firmware for unlocked GSM devices. As is typical with Treo firmware upgrades, it was frightening and anything but uneventful.

I had gotten tired of waiting for Palm to release a firmware updater for Mac OS X, so I finally decided to just do it on Windows, even though it’s not the primary machine that I sync with these days. I grabbed the wife’s laptop and attempted to sync with that, but I could not get it to sync. My wife recently installed Palm Desktop for Clie so she could sync her Clie – perhaps that somehow killed my Treo syncing or maybe it’s weirdness from trying to get Hotsync to work with Windows XP’s fast-user switching feature. Eventually I tired of trying to get it to work and thought maybe I’d do it on Virtual PC on my PowerBook. After many attempts, I could get the Virtual PC to see the Palm USB device but not to Hotsync with it. Many people complained about this on the Web but no one had a good solution beyond doing a Bluetooth sync instead. So I went with the Bluetooth sync, which of course is much slower, but also seemed to be very error-prone for me. It took maybe 5 attempts before I got it to send the entire update to the Treo – before that it kept losing the Bluetooth connection or something and ending up in a weird state. On said fifth attempt, it sent everything over and a reset or two later I had 1.20 and then just had to flip over to the Mac and Hotsync to restore my data.

So now it says 1.20 in Phone Info, though I haven’t played with it enough to have any opinion on whether it has helped or hurt speed, battery life, Bluetooth range, or sound quality. I guess time will tell…