I just did a second hard reset on my Cingular 8125. The offending application is SPB Diary. I just can’t get it to work without completely locking up my phone. It’s the reason I did the hard reset the first time, too.

I miss it. It’s a Today Plug-in that gives you a better view of your calendar, contacts, tasks and notes than the built-in Today screens.

I’ve been hearing good things about SPB Backup, so I decided to give it a try despite the fact that the company’s other application was giving me so many headaches. It works beautifully. I did a complete backup to my Mini SD card. Then I tried SPB Diary again, following some advice from SPB tech support that didn’t work. I tried everything I could to get SPB Diary off the phone without requiring a hard reset. Nothing worked.

I hard reset the phone, let the Cingular network items download (happens automatically) and then immediately clicked the backup file from the SD card. SPB Backup launched (even though I had originally installed the application to the phone, so the backup includes the application to run itself…smart), I selected a full restore, it did its thing, and on reset my device is exactly the way it was before I tried SPB Diary for the second time. Even the ActiveSync partnership works with no duplicated or missing calendar, task or contact entries.

If you don’t count the time I spent trying to get SPB Diary to work, total time from hard reset to functioning device was less than 20 minutes. If you’ve ever had to hard reset your handheld (Palm too), you understand just how nice that is.