PalmOne has posted instructions detailing how Treo 650 owners can claim their free 128MB SD memory card.

For starters, visit PalmOne's Treo support site here. You'll be asked to remove your Treo 650's battery and enter the handset serial and ID numbers thus revealed onto the web page.

Unless you own more than one 650, the offer is limited to one card per user. In any case, interested parties shouldn't hang around - the offer is also valid only "while stocks last", PalmOne's site notes. However, shipping is free, with cards going out on one to two weeks, the company said.

The offer came in response to complaints that the Treo 650's Flash memory configuration left rather less space for customer's data and applications than they had expected. Essentially, the data blocks into which the 650's storage is segmented are bigger than those on the 600, with the upshot that each application, database and file can take up more room on the newer machine than the older one, resulting in less free space.

PalmOne last month said it would offer the 128MB card to help Treo 650 users who might be running out of memory. The handset ships with 32MB. Tungsten T5 owners, who face the same problem, are not being offered a free SD card - their PDAs have plenty of spare memory, said PalmOne. The T5 has 256MB of storage capacity.

In addition to offering the gratis SD card, PalmOne said it was working on a firmware fix that would address the issue and "increase memory use efficiency to allow users to recapture most of the non-volatile file system (NVFS) overhead space currently lost to them". As yet there's no timeframe for the update's release. ®

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