New to Apple, iPhone, Itunes. Unlocked and lookin good...but!!!

[flyingdoctor]

Never owned an Apple product in my life. Bought a refurbished 8Gig iPhone and unlocked it yesterday. What a kicker. Worked perfectly. Hooked into the home wifi and surfed, youtubed, stock and weather without a hitch. Inserted the wife's $39 plan At&T SIM and everything worked as it should. This thing is just the absolute business. I'll not be using the internet stuff except under wifi as I'm sure the data charges would be horrendous (although I did disable that service previously) so I'm not sure what's happening. I'll have to check the bill.

The IPhone is tremendous, iTunes is suckier than a sucky thing. Wow what a crock. I'm so used to using my previous MP3 player as a windows drive. I just made folders and copied or deleted stuff within seconds. I used it for storage and transporting info between computers but that just doesn't seem to be possible with the iPhone. I had a look at the file structure briefly and it looks like it is Linux based.

ITunes sucks resources like a sponge. Fire it up and the CPU cycles jumps like a kangaroo. The fan kicks in and the computer sounds like a helicopter (I'm on a fairly new high spec PC running XP). I need to CTRL ALT DEL to kill all the iTunes process to bring everything back to normal.

As for the file management in iTunes. Hoily moley, there is nothing intuitive in it at all. It took me 5 minutes to copy a song over to the iPhone. I tried to copy over an audioboook with 259 files. I couldn't copy the folder and had to copy each file one at a time. I have to be missing something because I just gave up because of what a chore it was. I've tried Media Monkey but it can't recognise the iPhone. The same with other programs I've tried.

I've now started looking to see if there are any programs which make the iPhone a drive and I'll go back to manually transferring data, but no luck so far. I've also started looking at the other small applications and games that are appearing for the iPhone. Looks like a whole universe is about to open up.

Anyway, I guess this first posting is to say that I'm gobsmacked at just how cool the iPhone is. As an entertainment system it is fantastic. The phone quality is superb and far better than the company POS Blackberry I have to use (actually it is on AT&T too so I'll be swapping the SIM later to see what happens). The downside is iTunes and the fact that the phone isn't realy a "drive", well at the minute it isn't. Could an update of the firmware kill the unlock? More than likely, but why would I wan't to update it? It works perfectly now as it is.

I finally see the light with regard to Apple stuff. Nice to be part of the club

Pete

 

[plinden]

ITunes sucks resources like a sponge. Fire it up and the CPU cycles jumps like a kangaroo. The fan kicks in and the computer sounds like a helicopter (I'm on a fairly new high spec PC running XP). I need to CTRL ALT DEL to kill all the iTunes process to bring everything back to normal.

As for the file management in iTunes. Hoily moley, there is nothing intuitive in it at all.

Hmm, I've had iTunes on Windows machines and Macs and never had any problems. Perhaps on first starting up, iTunes is searching for your music, but it never uses appreciable CPU on my 2 year old 2.26GHz Pentium-M laptop.

It took me 5 minutes to copy a song over to the iPhone. I tried to copy over an audioboook with 259 files. I couldn't copy the folder and had to copy each file one at a time.

You need to go with the flow and stop fighting the interface. Open iTunes, give it a while to settle down, let it import your music - you can let it copy the music to the iTunes folder or manage it from the current location, but it's easier to let it manage your music. Once it's set up, it's the easiest interface I've ever used to manage music and your iPhone/iPod. You can set it up to automatically sync your audiobooks, or select which ones you want - no individual file management required.

If you want, you can set up smart playlists or standard playlists to manage your music/video/audiobooks. By the way, when you use iTunes, you never see the folder structure and to copy multiple files you select the files, not a folder.

But like I say, you have to stop fighting it. It's not like any other management program you've used and once you realize you don't have to do things the way you have had to up to now, you should find it easier (that said, lots of people never get used to it).