 |  I got an innocuous text message from AT&T on my Treo 680 over the holidays, asking me to upgrade my phone’s firmware. I trundled over to the Palm page they pointed at to see what was going on: the list included quite a few things but improved Bluetooth performance and better power management caught my eye. As it was, the 680 would often ignore trust of my Plantronics headset and force me to reenter the code, and its battery life left a lot to be desired since I was needing to charge pretty much daily. I decided to go for it. I’m impressed. I was on a call yesterday where one party was on a headset and mine was cutting in and out listening to him (although the other party that connected us was coming in fine), so I shut it off and tried the phone. It wasn’t much better, so I decided to go back to the headset – and it reconnected and rejoined the call, a pleasant surprise since I’d had trouble with that before. The hunting for the Plantronics device has also stopped – it just connects now.Also, after being fully charged and powered on in the morning, on that call for 75 minutes, taking a couple other short calls, and having Bluetooth powered until 8pm, it was still at 65% – that pattern would have probably left me at 25% starting from full previously. I’d made it a habit not to leave Bluetooth on during most days for power reasons before.What’s my point? No hardware change. Big change in performance and user experience by upgrading software. I’m thinking green – how many devices are out there where an upgrade could improve power consumption? I’ve done an upgrade for my Linksys router. I don’t know how to upgrade my HDTV, DVD player, or set-top box – but I know they all have the capability, and I know Cox downloads firmware sometimes. Almost all phones have upgrade capability as well, but many aren’t ever connected to a computer. How many devices are out there burning watts that could be saved easily?Tip of the cap to Palm for making an upgrade that applied easily and works, and to AT&T for pinging me to do something. But I’m a long time Palm user and a bit more advanced than the average phone consumer, who probably wouldn’t attempt an upgrade.Should somebody – the carriers, cable companies, or electronics retailers – offer a program targeting these folks to come in and upgrade their firmware to save power? “Come to our store, drop your (device) off while you shop, come back in an hour and we’ll have it reprogrammed and ready to go – and it will save X watts of energy per year.” Imagine the green PR. I know, it’s cheaper for someone to sell you a new device – but my Treo 680 is only about a year old. And there are a lot of different devices and reprogramming methods to deal with. And they’d probably have to bundle a service call for an HDTV tuneup, since they’d have to send a tech to the home.It’s a thought. Any takers? Or other ideas like standardizing and streamlining consumer device firmware upgrade procedures, to make it hands-off for the consumer (insert USB stick here … we’ll do the rest) ? It’s a difficult problem worth solving in my mind.Topics covered in this article
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