Give Our Abilities Time

Having a son has really cut into my blogging but a weight has hung over my head since I noticed a week or so ago that I actually have 10 subscribers on Google Reader. Instead of writing some long-ass blog entry with detailed, researched complaints, here are some short ones:

• Treo and Palm in general -- that company is dead. I switched to Blackberry. The incredible stability of the Verizon Blackberry 8830 has been amazing compared to the Treo 600, 650, and 700p I suffered with for four years.
  
• Windows Media Center -- I actually still use it but not to record TV. I got an HD DVR from my cable company for $9/mo and there is no way that will ever exceed all the money I spent on Media Center (PC, OTA HD tuner, extender, hard drives, antennas for OTA HD, etc.) and I still only get one HD channel reliably. And the SD cable picture sucked. When my cable company finally switched to digital (e.g. scrambled) cable it was time to choose Media Center or choose against Media Center. I chose against and so far, I miss 30-second skip (have to fast forward through commercials now) but other than that I have a much better picture and much more reliable recordings and behavior.
  
• Motorola S9 Bluetooth headphones -- these are cool and I got them with gift certificates so I'm not, like, burning with anger at these flaws, but I'm hard pressed to find situations in which the music stream doesn't skip. And, Blackberry's media player won't play audio through the S9 when playing a video, which was a huge disappointment (I was hoping to stop using the iPod and to just use these on my BB to watch videos). And, the iPod connector thing is so flaky that for days I didn't think it worked with my model of iPod (G5 Video). (The truth is that you have to wake up the iPod from deep suspended mode (where it shows the Apple logo to boot up) with the Bluetooth adapter connected, then play some music, and only then can you play video. If you let the music or video playing stop, you can't get it to start the Bluetooth thing again.) I like the idea of having these lightweight headphones that can play music on my Blackberry, and sometimes it works great (like if you are standing still on the subway, and turn off the Blackberry's cellular antenna) for music, and at the gym it is useful to go cordless with the iPod, but the connection is just flaky. I will someday get an iPod Touch but I do hope that it has A2DP Bluetooth built in by that point, working with video.
  
• Converting video -- I do this a lot as I grow obsessed with a TV series, buy the DVD or download all episodes from the newsgroups, and want to watch them on Media Center Extender at home or on iPod on my commute or on the treadmill at the gym. For the extender, make sure you get XVID video and MP3 audio. XVID + AC3 = pitch-shifted audio with silence every 5 seconds. (I heard that if you used stereo RCA jacks AC3 would be fine but that seems like a pain when I have an expensive Yamaha YSP amp with a coax digital connection which works fine for everything else.) So, basically no HD unless you find WMV content specifically converted for Xbox but I've found that can skip or have problems as well on the generally underpowered extender. For iPod, I use this random Aimersoft thing that has worked great (though not with AC3). Since I have to convert AC3 stuff to MP3 with AutoGK for the extender anyway, that leaves the extra step as conversions for the iPod. But basically it means that my PC is typically running some conversion process at all times.
  
• ThinkPad X60 Tablet with Vista -- This is my work PC and has been for close to two years now. I am growing to hate it but I'm not sure what would be better given that the weight, the battery life with the big 9-cell battery, and the 1400x1050 12" screen are all great. Wireless is flaky as hell (lately I can't switch it off with the hardware switch and then get it working again without a reboot), docking takes minutes and it never remembers that the monitor extends to the left, and the fingerprint reader only lasts for about 6 sleep/wake-up cycles before it is no longer recognized. That happens with a lot of stuff. I am rebooting every other day these days and that's BS. If anyone has suggestions on a business tablet that is a real speed improvement with equivalent weight and screen resolution, I'm all ears.
  

I have a much longer entry about the Treo/Blackberry thing among my OneNote pages here but I'll save that for another time or maybe it will never leave the drafts. I'm going to try to blog more and write less in 2009. Happy New Year,

--sbreck

First, my usual disclaimer:
Sorry I am such a lackadaisical blogger. Bizarrely, my traffic is basically the same whether I blog or not -- between 70 and 90 visits a day according to Google Analytics; although lately the trend is downward. I will try to get a series of shorter posts out more often than every 60 days. This is not one of these shorter posts.

Is there no way to gather more usable data from the Reliability Monitor? I ran it at work and it had data going back for three months, but seemingly no export capability. To get at the data, I screen-captured and pasted each screenful of data into OneNote, used "Copy text from picture", pasted them into TextPad to fix and put back into tabbed columns, and then pasted them into Excel. Now I can pull statistics like the following:

...and 11 other apps crashed once.

So what information can we draw from this?

Outlook:
It's somewhat unfair to taint Outlook by problems caused by its add-ons, or the size (~2GB) of my OST file, but 13 crashes in two months (none were logged in December, it would seem) is a couple crashes a week. And also, I'm probably like everyone else in that Outlook is far and away my most used app. So I don't know if I rebuilt my OST in the December timeframe, or some add-on that was causing instability got disabled and I never noticed, but I guess it's been better lately. I'll have to revisit after running Office 2007 SP1 for awhile.

OneNote:
OneNote has no add-ons, so I would have to blame its instability on a) poor handling of the online/internet/offline transition and b) LiveSessions. I have a notebook that I use constantly that's on a file share at work, a few notebooks on SharePoint that I edit throughout the day, and maybe 15% I am in meetings taking handwritten notes with my tablet. I also spend about 15 - 20% of my time in LiveSessions with one or two colleagues, taking shared notes in meetings. Handwriting is pretty stable, I think it's the LiveSessions that cause some crashing, and some of it is just random lock-ups.

Firefox:
Before I looked at the above statistics, I would have sworn to you that, at work, far and away my least reliable application was Firefox, and I still feel that these stats don't capture every crash or lock-up that I experience with Firefox. It is telling that Windows Reliability monitor didn't log any Firefox crash for almost two months, between 9/20 and 11/15, while I guess it was on version 1.8.20070.25881 (or maybe some interim, extremely stable version between that and 1.8.20071.2514). I like to think that I have minimal add-ons in my work Firefox but I must have enough to cause a persistent instability, like freezing when I resize the window with an IE Tab page selected, or a freeze that just happens without using Firefox for awhile.

Why do I stick with Firefox because it's so unreliable? I guess my IE 7 experience was worse, or sufficiently different and lacking in functionality as compared to Firefox that it wasn't worth it. IE 7 didn't seem to have as robust a tab saving mechanism as Firefox, and it crashed often enough that a group of tabs that I meant to leave open were gone, and that really got on my nerves after awhile.

TabTip:
This is a TabletPC thing that Vista is convinced has some compatibility issue. I can't remember the error but Vista seems to periodically close it and throw some error message. Mind you, this has never happened when I'm actually in tablet mode or using tablet features, it happens when I'm doing something else altogether.

Communicator:
I don't remember this crashing, to be honest, so I don't know why.

DeskSite:
DeskSite likes to freeze up when you launch a document out of it -- it's not just a Vista problem, it happened a lot when I had XP, too. With the Vista error reporting feature turned on, most of the time I can actually find out why this is hanging -- typically it is Firefox but it can also be OneNote, Outlook, or Visio (which isn't really integrated with Interwoven yet and basically causes problems whenever it is launched).

I think I've already ranted about legal-specific software vendors, and I know this will be a popular search result because it contains the terms "Interwoven" and "SharePoint", so I will be gentle and note that despite my enmity towards the Interwoven product, its competitor (Open Text LiveLink eDOCS and whatever else they called it, formerly Hummingbird DM5) just a few days ago released their Office 2007 product. So, like, a full year after Office 2007 shipped. Shows you where the Open Text product is going -- down the toilet. (Disclaimer: The previous view is mine alone and does not represent the view of my employer)

Procmon:
If you forget about procmon and leave it running, you use up all your RAM and your computer falls to shit. Of course, you usually RUN procmon so you can figure out why something else is going to shit on your computer, so sometimes procmon is a symptom rather than a cause. Regardless, that's what's going on with my 4 procmon crashes, I think.

SPCSCM.exe:
I don't even know what the hell this is so I looked it up to find that it's the Sprint PCS Connection Manager. I delivered (and then took back two months later) an EVDO card to my colleague and so of course I installed the software for use on the trips to and from Chicago. I have a Treo 700p with PDAnet and the PCS software, despite the 3 crashes, was like 300 times more reliable than that piece of shit PDAnet. I'm glad I can get Internet access for free and only expensed $25 or whatever to my company. But I'd way rather not have to spend 20 minutes fucking with, and ultimately rebooting, my laptop to get stupid PDAnet to work. As I have said before, PDAnet is better than not having any Internet access, but not by much.

The rest:
I realize I'm detailing the apps that crashed on my work computer, which is inherently a fool's errand to begin with. But since I started it I might as well finish:

Visio: Visio 2007 Interwoven integration is non-existent, but for some reason it is enough to leave Visio.exe in memory, using 50% CPU and fucking up all other Interwoven calls, until you kill it. Hence the three crashes. I like to think that I am really good at Visio, but with 2007, if I can avoid using it, I will.

Excel: Excel is usually really good so I'm surprised to see these two crashes. I blame Interwoven for this, also. Maybe unfairly ;)

Enteo NetInstall: This company has like three support people in the U.S. and after two years of terrible service my company has ceased recommending its products. I try, on my computer, not to run NetInstall but there are some apps our IT people packaged that I need so I have to from time to time. This then leads to the inventory app running up my CPU utilization until the app is killed.

I was going to check my home PC against this, as I would think the results are very different, but I didn't realize how long this blog entry would turn out to be. I think that, in summary:

• Reliability Monitor would be even more useful if it could export its data to help you pinpoint your worst-behaved apps
  
• I think Reliability Monitor misses some crashes and hangs
  
• Firefox is totally unreliable on my work PC but is excellent at home with the same add-ons plus a dozen more; WTF?
  
• Interwoven DeskSite can cause unreliability
  
• Microsoft products crash the most :D
  

Back soon,

--sbreck

Recently I upgraded to Goodlink 5 on my Treo 700p. Observations so far:

• It is slower, and has slowed down my whole Treo. Even Solitaire is sluggish.
  
• Nice features for accepting calendar appointments -- you no longer have to send acceptance, or be prompted for a comment.
  
• I thought the Conversation view (press "C" with a message highlighted for a shortcut) was useless, but then I had a bunch of email to get through after a long meeting and it actually helped me make short work of long threads.
  
• Having an RSS reader is a great feature and the implementation is pretty good, but my main complaint is that it kind of fails at the main function of an RSS reader, which is to keep track of what you have and have not read. It's kind of annoying to read the same things twice or sometimes three times. And I only have I think 5 feed subscriptions. Still, I actually think it's a more professional implementation than QuickNews, which I actually paid for but never really use. (Having the feeds periodically refreshing might be the cause of Treo slowness. Still, QuickNews took like the entire 7-minute time period from waiting for the elevator to getting on the subway, and if you forgot to do it, forget it. I basically stopped using QuickNews months ago, but am reading feeds on the subway again.) The Good-like interface where the center button both opens and closes the article, and "p" and "n" go through the articles, is really well thought out and immediately easy to use. If they took more care in ensuring I didn't sometimes have to read the same things I would call this a must-have upgrade.
  
• Related to the above, the news ticker thing (the way the RSS reader alerts you) is a bit annoying. It seems to scroll through articles a bit too fast, to the degree that it actually makes you sort of tense to not read them. But RSS feeds are a low, low priority item so maybe I should turn the bar off. Then again, I'd never read the feeds like with QuickNews. Hmmm…
  
• Still getting used to the Send/Receive shortcut key changing from "s" to "z". Slightly annoyed about it. Have so far never meant to use the "filter by sender" function, though I suppose it could also be helpful in triaging a massive amount of emails.
  
• The starred ("Priority") items could have used a little more thought, in my opinion. Or else I need to stop overthinking the function. (Eh, wrong blog for that ;) I extensively use Automatic Formatting in Outlook and initially thought this was kind of a neat way for Goodlink to have this as well. But for work, a critical Goodlink function is that high priority emails vibrate my Treo, and I use some rules to make sure the "crying wolf" factor is minimized -- e.g. your emails to me go in the jail if you forward a lot of inappropriately high priority vendor emails, or if you are a vendor that sends me high priority emails. So as much as I would like it for emails sent just to me to be starred, I need emails that are high priority to vibrate my Treo and I don't want SearchStorage.com or whatever vibrating it. Still, this is a nice first attempt at helping you separate low priority emails from higher priority, but it comes at the expense of the paging function I require in my line of work.
  
• I've had Goodlink 5 for maybe two weeks and this morning I got the dreaded GX_ASSERT error, which meant I had to reprovision Good on my device. I don't know if I should blame Good/Motorola or Palm for that.
  

technorati: Palm, Treo, Goodlink

I recognize the shocking amount of time that has passed since I last blogged. Cut me some slack, we have a 2-month-old baby named Oscar now. Anyway, here are some little short rants to get out of the blogging standstill:

Palm sucks:

• Why does my dad's Verizon phone that he got for free have a pretty cool and useful GPS function using the built-in locator, but we Treo owners have to spend hundreds for external GPS? He paid nothing, and I (actually, my company) paid $585 for my phone (upgrade from 650 to 700p out of contract), so why am I the one who has no GPS function? Palm deserves a beating.
  
• I installed the 1.10 update so that my Treo wouldn't freeze up searching for a signal when I was on the subway. And now it's even worse. Palm, you suck. I'm switching to Blackberry as soon as I possibly can. Your platform is dead.
  
• Speaking of Palm sucking, that Foleo thing is the most useless thing that they could possibly have done. Apple has an new convergence device coming out with a radical new user interface? How can we compete? Oh, I know, a little toy laptop thing that has to be connected to a Treo to work. Guess what? I have a $2200 laptop that has to go with me when I leave the office, so I can use Microsoft Outlook and Office, Interwoven document management, DTE time entry, and a browser. I can also take notes on it because it's a TabletPC. I don't need another slightly smaller and lighter laptop that runs half-assed versions of those apps on Linux.
  

Computers suck:

• I am still plagued with OneNote sync problems with SharePoint ("This section contains changes that cannot be synced because access to the section file is denied. Correct the file permissions or save your copy of this section elsewhere."). Apparently this is a known issue, and you can only find out about it by reading the microsoft.public.onenote newsgroup.
  
• McAfee SecurityCenter came bundled with my Dell and it is really annoying. Most annoying is when it downloads an update requiring a restart, which causes a loud bell sound and popup what seems like every 20 minutes. Can't they take a cue from Windows Updates, which pops up a balloon with a gentle "pop" sound? This throws me out of all-important Unreal Tournament 2004 games and makes me wonder why I have the program in the first place. I've already turned off the firewall (it didn't usually ask what to block, it just blocked, and the rules are too deeply hidden in the shitty user interface). And, yeah, I turned off the firewall of my own free will, so stop giving me grief about it every time I start my computer. Also, the virus scan finds the same two virii from some 8-year-old backups that it can't clean, plus a dozen cookies, so how much protection do I need and can this thing even give it to me? Verdict: McAfee SecurityCenter sucks.
  
• I grow weary of Vista on my ThinkPad X60 Tablet. The laptop is awesomely fast and 1400x1050 on a crystal-clear 12" screen is the best thing ever, but at least once a week I have to hard-power it off because it crapped out while hibernating, or refuses to come out of sleep mode. Also, could the stupid bastard remember for once that I like to extend my desktop to the left, onto the other display? When docked, additional display on left; when not docked, normal screen. There. Was that so hard? Then why do I have a little screen adventure every time I put the laptop in the dock? Perhaps both of these issues are related to Lenovo drivers and not Vista. Regardless, it annoys me as a person that docks and undocks the laptop and takes it places. Did XP Tablet suck that badly? Why do I use Vista, anyway? These are things I shouldn't be thinking as someone Microsoft thinks will be driving Vista and Office 2007 upgrades in my vertical market.
  

I cannot promise I will blog again soon, but I will try.

--sbreck

technorati: Palm, Treo 700p, Foleo, OneNote 2007, SharePoint, McAfee SecurityCenter, Vista, TabletPC, ThinkPad X60

Though I'm pretty happy with the mobile version of Gmail in my Treo browser, I am intrigued by Gmail Mobile which recently came out. Of course I immediately went to this site on my Treo, and found that "Your device does not support this filetype". (As an aside, this is true, read the FAQ: Verizon devices are not supported because the greedy bastards lock you into their "Buy-it-now" or whatever it's called version of BREW so you have to buy every Java app from them directly.)

Still, I don't like to pay for things and I do like to find new cool things to do with my Treo. Taking a look at the gm-Palm-Treo_700p.jad file that was downloaded, I found that it was a tiny text file that had as its first line:

ERROR: Gmail is not supported on your device

Hmm. It did, however contain a link to a JAR file, which I downloaded on my PC and attempted to launch. No go, which I guess is understandable.

OK, I have two possible approaches. One is to convert the JAD & JAR files into a PRC, which seems to be to be easiest. There are some instructions on Sun's site that tell you step by step how to do this and make it look as easy as possible: take your JAD & JAR files, run Converter.bat, and they magically become a PRC file that you can install. Unfortunately, the article is almost five years old, and in five years the MIDP has gone from version 1.0 to version 2.0 (heh, gotta love Sun) and it no longer includes Converter.bat or really anything recognizable from that article. As much as I would like to flip Verizon a big fat bird by easily installing a PRC, I am stymied at this time.

The other approach is to download "WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment" from Palm and install it so you can run Java apps on your Treo. You will have to fill out a form (hint: say you're a developer and that you work for a corporation in order to get authorized; I remember signing up for this download before and failing) and pretend to have a Treo 650, but then you can download it. I installed the JVM itself (J9JavaVMMidp20) and the two JSR-172 files in case we need "Web Services" to get to Gmail. I then saw that IBM Java VM appeared in my program list. I launched it and clicked Install, and then began typing in the URL I discovered earlier. Then I hit a snag -- there is no underscore character on the Treo keyboard, and you can't hit Ctrl-Space to bring up the list of alternate characters, and there isn't even a paste button. Shit! So I typed http://www.gmail.com/app instead. This came back with an error "The application descriptor was missing the required MIDlet-Name field". Remembering the JAD file I had downloaded before, I noted that it actually did contain this field, so it wasn't that the file wasn't compatible; to prove this I typed http://sbreck.blogspot.com in the URL field and got the same error. Hmm. Do you think maybe Google did this to prevent Treo people from installing this? That would be devious. So I typed in the JAR file URL and what do you know? After a security warning, it came back with "AMS successfully installed "Gmail" midlet"!

I launched it, logged in, and it seemed to work fine! Very speedy and nice. Java is a bit weird because it doesn't really work that well with the Treo four-way navigation (like to highlight buttons) but I would probably use this instead of m.gmail.com going forward.

Plus it was the satisfaction of running a Java app without paying Verizon that made it extra great. Go, Google!

--sbreck

technorati: Treo 700p Gmail Mobile Palm

Lately I feel like, as I finally achieve a relatively stable equilibrium on my work Tablet PC despite switching to beta software for two of my critical applications (Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007), certain other key weapons in my technological arsenal are falling to shit. Maybe you can only have one technology item work well for you at a time.

Anyway, the point of this short blog entry is to note that, with no provocation, on Wednesday I began receiving the GX_ASSERT error with my not-much-more-than-two-month-old Treo 700p. Again. This time, I knew not to have a tantrum, and instead calmly waited until I got to work, and then:

• asked to have my Goodlink user and cached profile blown away and recreated
  
• hard reset my Treo
  
• downloaded the OTA setup from get.good.com
  
• reinstalled Good
  
• re-set all my Good settings (e.g. delete certain annoying autotext, turn off most of the reminders)
  

Then I was back in business. I know it was punishment for thinking the other day, "Hey, the Treo 700p / Goodlink 4.9 combo has been worked great for kind of awhile now!" It's like it heard me, and decided to show me why Palm is ditching their OS for some Linux thing... OH NO I DIDN'T

--sbreck

P.S. hahaha, speaking of technology turning against me, the Blog This thing with OneNote/Word also failed me. (It popped up a username and password box that would accept no usernames or passwords or even the Cancel button.) I would say it was due to Blogger testing out their beta editor for some lucky group of people and breaking their API for the rest of us schmucks, but then when I went into Word I found it had yet again lost my account credentials for this blog. WTF Microsoft, do you write the credentials on a napkin or something?

See yesterday's entry for background

Well, at work today, I found that my IT guys were ready to release the 4.9.1.46_EN Palm client to me, so I let them. They also found two cached profiles on the Good server, and deleted and recreated my account and thus sent a new PIN. I hard reset, OTA'd myself a fresh copy of the client, and to my great relief, I was able to get past the "Error 65, Press R to reprovision" which was the bane of my Sunday.

So, some combination of:

• deleting cached profiles on the Good server
  
• deleting my user account on the Good server and recreating it
  
• updating my Goodlink client to 4.9.1.46_EN
  

fixed my problems.

--sbreck

This is like the fifth weekend day in the last few months I've given up to fix a problem with my Treo that just showed up out of the blue, so that I would have a working device on my weekly St. Louis trips. Fuck Palm, I should have bought a Q.

--sbreck

update: fixed

So I switched from a Treo 650 to a 700p. The main reason I started this blog entry was to note my solitaire stats in case they do not transfer over to the 700p:

6028/60=100.46 hours of solitaire played. So like four 24-hour days of solitaire. Or, over the year or so that I had the Treo 650, 100.46/365=0.27 or 15 minutes a day, every day. That's really pretty impressive. My commute is like 25 minutes each way, about 10 of which are walking to the train or from one train to the other. And of course I have only commuted by subway three days a week for the last 10 months -- I am in St. Louis two days a week and usually stay put on the weekends.

(As an aside, I'm using the awesome new OneNote 2007 "napkin math" feature in which it does simple calculations in-line. Chris Pratley wrote that it was one of those things they created with no "use case" but just because they thought it would be cool, and I find that almost every day that I use OneNote, which is basically every day at work because I go to a lot of meetings, I wish I had it. Can't upgrade to 2007 until all my colleagues do.)

OK, on to the Treo 700p. Things that are great:

• EVDO is much faster than whatever the shitty sub-modem-speed network the 650 used. Goodlink like blasted down onto it, and flightaware.com is far faster than it used to be.
  
• Hiding your password in Blazer (the browser) for sites that require authentication
  
• Blazer deals better with putting you right to your site if you switch to something else
  
• Most of my apps (except Solitaire) installed right onto the 700p without messing it up
  
• The sync cable charges the device now, very nice touch (although I would characterize it as an oversight that the 600 and 650 cables didn’t charge off of USB)
  
• I don't know if it's the 700 or Goodlink 4.8.1.14, but I no longer have to manually change the time zone in Goodlink. The "Use Palm time zone" setting never really worked for me on my 650. As a person who went from EDT to CDT twice this week (STL Tuesday-Wednesday and ORD Saturday-Sunday) this feature is useful.
  

Things that aren't so great:

• I lost my stats in Solitaire :(
  
• The keys are going to take some getting used to -- Home is where Power/Hangup was, and Power is now where Menu used to be.
  
• The Verizon store (42nd & 6th) took like an hour from the time I was able to order to when I was able to walk out of the door. And, before that, I went and waited for half an hour at the 57th & 6th store before being told they didn't have it.
  
• The VZAccess Manager software is not letting me onto the internet on my laptop. Strictly speaking I am not sure I have a BroadbandAccess account, but I showed a printout of this page to the sales guy and he said I didn't need it. I assume he is wrong and that's why I can't connect. It's a bit annoying because I'd rather pay (or, in my case, expense to my company) for a service I intend to use than screw around all night to try and kludge it so it works.
  
• Update: I instead installed PDANet for the Treo 700p. I have owned this for the 600 and 650 in the past and it was OK with my old tablet, but never really worked well on my ThinkPad X41. So I was really hoping that Verizon's own VZAccess Manager tool would be better, but I'm noticing a day later that it can no longer even find the phone by Bluetooth (which worked last night) or USB (which never worked). Meanwhile, PDANet (or maybe Goodlink?) threw up a bunch of messages that the Dial-Up Networking stack is in use but then ran solidly for like an hour. DSLreports showed 548Kbps which is certainly good enough for me -- in fact that's more than twice as fast as the connection in my hotel room in St. Louis. So, if Verizon's salesman doesn't know how to sell me the BroadbandAccess service and tells me I don't need it to use the Treo 700 for high-speed internet on my laptop, then I assume I am not violating any terms of service.
  
• A day or so later, I resumed my laptop from standby and tried again. It quickly disconnected, shades of my prior experience with PDANet, but on the second try I was able to sustain a connection. It wasn't quite as good as the first one, since another DSLreports test showed 240Kbps, but that's what I get in the hotel so it's still definitely usable.
  
• If service is dropping in and out, like on a subway, apps will freeze when it's trying to look for service or briefly connects to service. This is pretty annoying and I may just end up turning off wireless before I go on the subway, which is also annoying (plus I enjoy the little email catch-up when the 2/3 stops at 72nd St during my morning commute).
  

I have to admit that I didn't look for other reviews so if you've read other Treo 700p reviews that mentioned the same stuff, then I apologize for wasting your time. I just have been such a slacker about posting that I figured I would procrastinate this entry forever if I actually wanted to also research it...