The iTunes + iPhone Ordeal (Episode 2)

Nothing seems to motivate me better than rage, apparently. Have you ever seen me writing two blogs in a row? No, except the current issue that I would refer to as "iPhone ordeal".

Either the iPhone is destined not to be my kind of phone, or I am in a really odd situation, the frustration is real.

Despite the promise from an AT&T representative that their billing system was being updated in the early morning until 7AM, iTunes still does not work in the afternoon. I called again, and it turns out that I am still using the old (pre-Cingular) AT&T account, and they had to manually switch over.

The activation went on smoothly afterwards, but then here comes the iTunes ordeal:

1. The first screen you can see in iTunes is a black window, as if the software has crashed.
2. While Windows Vista is brilliant enough to be able to detect the photo storage of the iPhone in Windows Explorer each time I reconnect the phone, iTunes sometimes would be dumbfounded, sat still and could not detect the device.
3. The iTunes browser is the slowest browser I had ever used. Pages had a barber shop progress bar that only indicates pages are loading does not indicate any progress.
4. The skinned buttons have not tactile responses. Sometimes you cannot really tell if you had clicked a button, or if iTunes is just hanging.
5. Podcasts and iPhone update downloads constantly failed half-way, as it does not fare well in 'slow' Internet connections. (P.S. I'm using a EVDO connection.)
6. My photos were never synchronized properly. Every time I tried to disconnect and reconnect, it will halt in the middle, giving me this dialog:
   
   
   
7. The calendar took three syncs to get it right. In fact, I can never tell if iTunes had ever attempted copying anything to my phone.

Meanwhile, the iPhone experience has been not too bad so far. I was able to browse web pages, set up my contacts and wallpapers, and so on. The novelty factor does wear off pretty quickly though, however. There are a few annoyances so far:

1. It takes quite a while to find the contact I want to dial to. Since it does not have a dialpad-based contact search like Windows Mobile does, I have to remember everyone's last names in other to find them. I have 100+ contacts, and even though I have a good memory of last names, it is much slower to find a contact here than in my WinMo.
2. Besides, it takes too many steps to get into the dialpad, since there is no hardware dialpad anywhere.
3. The squeezing and un-squeezing finger actions is not very accurate. While it works fine for casual browsing of photos, the finger flicking makes it too easy to jump around Google Maps accidentally, and wastes bandwidth and loading time as a result.
4. The mail application marks everything from my mailboxes as unread. Worse still, there is no way to mark all mail as unread.
5. Gmail is treated as a POP3 mailbox. And I don't understand why mails that I wrote would end up in my Inbox.
6. There is no easy way to sync Notes.
7. There are no voice recorder software available.

So my iPhone refund countdown has officially begun... It will properly be due this Thursday. It is going to be a lot of hassles, dealing with the Apple store refund and the AT&T switching back process, but it probably will worth all the headaches I will get by using iTunes.