While we've known about that pesky Sprint Treo Pro delay for a few weeks now and that it had something to do with Sprint's certification process, up till now we had no idea exactly what was wrong.
According to PhoneNews, what is being fixed is that annoyingly low RAM that we've reported on previously and talked about in the Podcast. In case you don't remember, the Treo Pro only has ~43 MB of free available RAM after a soft-reset, which is about 20 MB or so lower than its GSM cousin.
HTC engineers have confirmed that the issue causing the continual delay of the Sprint Treo Pro lies in continuous ROM testing and certification to resolve a perpetual low free memory issue after many insiders discovered that the Treo Pro had ~40 MB of free memory with no applications running, despite shipping with 256 MB of RAM.
Evidently the problem is this: The RAM on this device is on separate chips and Windows Mobile has problems recognizing this extra amount of memory – so it is physically there, just not being seen by the system. This mirrors some similar issues with HTC's Touch Pro (Verizon) and other original Touch devices, so it sounds very plausible.
At first, my initial assessment having used the device was that it wasn't too big of a deal. But with more extensive usage, I recanted on that notion: 40mb is too little for a 2009 device. Also, we should point out that the Treo Pro only has 128 MB of RAM (like the GSM version), not 256 MB. Although this begs the question: How does a device get so far in development without anyone noticing the extremely (and unusual) low amount of RAM? This isn't like some rare software bug but rather a standard and obvious device specification.
Finally, we're getting word that some Sprint stores are getting re-stocked as we speak with new Treo Pros with the new ROM on board, so keep an eye out for those. Now if you don't mind, I'm going to get my Treo Pro packed and ready to send to the HTC gods ;-)
