As an aside, I’m really liking the Treo Pro a lot. The BlackJack II is a great phone, but I didn’t realize how much I’d miss the touchscreen. The Treo Pro is great on many levels: very thin, hardware keyboard, and touchscreen. And the Opera Mobile 9.5 beta, which didn’t work on Windows Mobile Standard, actually makes Web browsing enjoyable again. I do wish mobile device companies would back off the current trend of making everything glossy, though. Not only is this thing (and the BlackJack II, for that matter) a fingerprint magnet, it feels as if it’s going to slip out of my hands. I may get an Invisible Shield for the back just to make it less slippery in my hand. I can’t see using that with a stylus, though, given the tacky, slightly rubbery feel.

Yael’s Web site links to the following video, which I hope means it won’t get yanked due to copyright violation.

The worst is the address used for my eMusic subscription, which now receives between 20-50 spams each day. I am also receiving spam at the address I used when I was a Sprint PCS customer, as well as addresses used for rebate submissions to Sprint, CompUSA, Micro Center, and Daewoo Electronics. The latter two were separate store and manufacturer rebates on a 17″ LCD monitor a few years back and I used a different variation of the address for each rebate. Both addresses receive the same spam, usually only a few seconds apart. It wasn’t until last week that I noticed the spam at the Sprint PCS addresses; one was my customer address, the other was for a Sprint mail-in rebate.

A search for eMusic spam turned up several people who have had unique addresses given only to eMusic become targets for spam. I complained to eMusic support about about this and actually got a response from a human asking me to forward complete copies of some example spam along with message headers. I sent them twenty samples and a week or two later got the same response others have received: it’s a dictionary attack.

That’s crap. If it were a dictionary attack I would be getting tens of thousands of spams to all kinds of unique words or word combinations. Instead, the spam I receive is targeted at about three or four specific addresses these days. In fact, about 90% of my spam has been stopped simply by blocking about twenty specific addresses at the server; before that, I would routinely receive anywhere from 3,000-4,000 spams every 24 hours. The remaining 300-400 spams I receive each day are sent almost exclusively to my primary e-mail address and my eMusic address.

It’s pretty clear that when executives want some more money, privacy policies can be easily rewritten to permit a company to sell whatever customer data they feel like sharing. One person whose eMusic address has been spammed thought that eMusic’s servers had been compromised. I don’t believe that. Rather, I think one look at their “privacy” policy shows that they are free to share their customers’ personal information with whatever “partner” they wish, making that data subject to some other company’s privacy policy which we, as the customer, have no ability to accept or reject. eMusic itself may not have sold the customer data, but it’s likely that one of their “partner” companies did. (A note for the lawyers in the audience: I’m not outright accusing eMusic or its partners of doing this; it just seems a bit suspicious that this particular e-mail address is now receiving spam.)

As an aside, because I have never used my primary address for anything but personal mail, I suspect the majority of the spam is from well-meaning friends using it to send e-cards or it having been harvested from peoples’ mailboxes by viruses, worms, and other malware. Folks, BCC is a friend and you should use it. It’s simply not a good idea to send a message addressed to tens or hundreds of To or CC recipients. But that’s a different topic.

I discovered that Iambic’s registration method is rather convoluted. You must first install the software on the device either from the desktop or a CAB installer on the device, get the Device ID from the About box, go to their Web site (on a desktop PC) and enter that ID into a form to generate your registration code. You must then type that code into separate boxes on the device as show here.

I keep all of my software registration codes in another program on my device, so I always have them with me if needed. The annoyance with this registration method is that if I’m installing while not near a desktop PC, I have to switch back and forth between Vehicle Manager and my registration code list. (That’s assuming I already had the code and wasn’t trying to fight with their Web site in IE on the device.) Why? Because I can’t simply copy and paste the entire code due to the separate boxes.

Don’t the developers actually use handheld devices and realize how awkward and inconvenient their registration system is? Sure, it’s a one time process for most people, but it makes the software seem unnecessarily unfriendly.

Release a 3G-capable version with native Exchange ActiveSync support, and I’d probably buy one. I’ve got to give Apple a lot of credit. I find their elitist attitude as a company very annoying and at times insulting — especially their advertising — but they do make some damn impressive hardware. The iPhone brings some powerful and innovative technology into the hands of regular consumers in the form of a device which is easy to use, intuitive to interact with, and — dare I say — fun. That is something that Microsoft and Palm really haven’t been able to do with most of their devices. Seeing and using an iPhone really illustrated to me just how clunky Windows Mobile is. There is hope of improvements with upcoming Windows Mobile releases, but in the regular consumer market, it may be too late to get the ball back from Apple. Even long-time Windows Mobile enthusiasts are considering a move toward other solutions involving the iPhone.

I experimented with some things and even rolled the driver back to the previous version using Device Manager. Nothing helped and I was still dealing with sleep times of a minute or more. As someone who puts his system to sleep many times a day and shuts down maybe once a week or so, this was not acceptable. So I did something I’ve never done before in Windows Vista (and only twice in Windows XP): I used a System Restore point to revert the system to the way it was prior to the driver update.

To my delight, the problem was resolved and my tablet is now back to entering sleep mode in under five seconds. This was the first time I’d seen a problem like this from a driver update, so I’m definitely going to be a little gun-shy with such updates in the future. It’s nice to see that System Restore worked so well, though I hope to not have a need for it on a regular basis.