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• Absolutely need a computer + iTunes to ‘unbrick’ the phone so to speak. This leaves linux users in the dust. Also what if you don’t have a computer and just want a cool phone?
• App store EULA stated I could use paypal for payment, yet the signup asked for a credit card and had no way to enter paypal information. I found later I could go through iTunes and set this up but still a disapointment that I couldn’t do it via the phone. And to be honest I’m not sure it worked because it still displays my credit card under payment information.
• No easy way to delete default apps. Follow the previous link to learn to do it the hard way.
• Touch pad sometimes doesn’t work at all! Wait, that’s because my fingers are big and are triggering the pad at the sides when I normally hold the phone.
• My refurbished iPhone did not come with any instruction manual. Not sure if there even is an instruction manual for the iPhone.
• Did a search, and nope can’t get a bluetooth keyboard to work for the iPhone. In fact apparently you can’t get anything but mono headsets to work.
• In order for me to program my own apps, I need to pay $99 at least to sign up with the iPhone Developer Program.
• My flubby fingers hate hitting the M button on the keyboard. Keeps thinking I hit the delete key.
• Sometimes the keyboard is smart, displaying a .com button for web addresses and defaulting to they numerical keyboard when you need to insert numbers. Sometimes it’s dumb, just giving you the standard keyboard.
• iPhone does not import contacts from SIM cards. I had to manually type in every phone number.
• I’ve been able to find tutorials to do most everything above and much much more. All these tutorials seems to start with… ‘I’m assuming your iPhone is jailbreaked.’

Don’t get me wrong. I’m loving my iPhone and it’s miles above my Nokia brick phone I had previously. But there do seem to be some gotchas.

I got an iphone yesterday.

Although currently it’s not activated, for that I have to wait a few days. So I thought I’d see what I can do with it in spite of that.

So far it turns out I can’t do anything.

Upon loading up the iphone I’m greeted with a picture telling me to plug the phone into iTunes. On the bottom it says slide here for emergency, which I suppose allows one to make emergency calls despite the fact it isn’t activated.

I really didn’t want to install iTunes. I wanted a more agnostic approach to controling my iphone so I hit the net. My first idea was to try to get my iphone synced with foobar2k. I quickly found a plugin called foo_pod but then was disapointed to learn it isn’t available for the latest version of foobar. But that led me to an alternate plugin called foo_dop.

However the requirements for foo_dop stated I needed to install iTunes in order for it to work. I was back at square one. Googling again I found this comparison of ipod managers on wikipedia. First on the list stated Amarok has iphone support. Maybe I could get this to work on my linux box. But after searching I found not only did it not support my phone. But also amarok 2 doesn’t seem to support any phones at all.

I looked through the list. Trying to find something. I came across floola. But it doesn’t support iphones. I tried mediachest, but it requires java.

I then tried gtkpod. Which in order to use you need to mount the iphone first. So I installed ifuse. It seemed like it worked, although when I plugged in my iphone I got three camera icons instead of one in addtion to the mounted drive. I could see many directories on my iphone. Maybe I was in buisness.

But alas, no matter what I tried and how many tutorials I read I could not get gtkpod to recognize my phone.

And at that I ran out of options as far as I can tell. So I’m off to download iTunes in all it’s glory.