One of the benefits of having waited a week before getting my iPhone is that I was able to read all the early reviews of the device. Thus, when I finally made my purchase, I felt confident I knew what I was getting; I was well aware of the joys of using iPhone as well of how infuriating it could be. My confidence, as it turns out, was a bit misplaced.

As I covered in a previous entry, the early reviews did not prepare me for just how impressed I would be with iPhone overall. As Apple’s ads put it, “touching is believing”—and I needed to actually play with one for awhile before I truly believed. More importantly, the coverage of the numerous the flaws in iPhone didn’t really prepare me for just how much some of them would bug me. Your mileage may vary, of course. What drives me nuts may not be a big deal to you. But I know I am not alone here.

Once you get past the obvious iPhone omissions (such as no voice-dialing), the one thing that most bothers me about the device is the amount of clicks, swipes and button-pressing needed to accomplish simple tasks. Allow me to give you two particularly irksome examples—and offer a potential solution (one that will require a bit of redesign of iPhone by Apple).

Using an iPhone as an iPod while driving. Yup. Others have already pointed out that the lack of tactile feedback from physical buttons makes actions such as skipping to the next song much harder to do with iPhone than with a traditional iPod, especially when trying to do so entirely by touch while you keep your eyes on the road. But it’s much worse than that. It’s how many extra clicks are needed for what should only require one click in any case.

On a traditional iPod, you just feel your way to the right spot on the click wheel, and press it. Done.

With iPhone, you first have to press the Home button to wake up the device. That’s because, to save battery power, the screen keeps turning off. Next, you have to swipe to unlock iPhone. If you left iPhone with the iPod application open, you will now be returned there (whew, that’s one bit of good news!). Otherwise, you’ll need to press the iPod icon. At last, you get to press the skip button (which still takes a bit of skill to hit just right while driving). This assumes iPhone’s display is in portrait mode. In landscape mode, there is no skip button, so you’ll first have to get back to portrait mode, yet another step. I tried to navigate all this while driving, but eventually gave up. For playing music in my car, I will be using my older iPod from now on. Bummer!

Note: You can eliminate the need to start off by waking up and unlocking iPhone if you go to Settings>General and set Auto-Lock to Never. Now iPhone never sleeps unless you manually press the Sleep-Wake button. This would work fine if your method of connecting your iPhone to your car’s speakers incorporates a charger (which is not uncommon these days), making the drain on the battery not relevant. Otherwise, you could combine setting Auto-Lock to Never with setting iPhone’s Brightness to its lowest level and turning Auto-Brightness to Off; this would minimize the screen’s effect on battery drain. In either case, you would have to remember to reverse the settings when you leave the car. Not super-convenient, but a possible alternative if you are planning on taking a long car ride.

Making a call that isn’t in your contact list. Suppose you want to dial a new number, a number that is not in your contact list anywhere? On a traditional mobile phone, it’s simple. Just take out the phone and start pressing numbers on the keypad. On iPhone, you first have to wake up the screen and unlock the phone (as you must do for virtually anything you want to do with iPhone). Next, if you are not at the Home screen or the Phone application, you need to press the Home button. Then you need to press the Phone button. Finally, if the keypad is not displaying by default, you have to press the Keypad button. That’s five actions needed before you even see the keypad! That’s at least 4 actions too many for such a basic and common usage of the phone.

By the way, the problems here multiply if you are trying do to all of this while driving! This is another reason why voice-dialing is a critically needed addition. It would allow you to “dial” handsfree via a Bluetooth headset.

A solution? There are several possible solutions here. None are perfect. One solution that would help in at least some cases would be to have the icons in the menu bar touch-sensitive. For example, when playing a song in iPod, a Play icon appears in the menubar. It would be great if pressing that icon acted as a pause/play button (saving you the need to return to the iPod application to pause a song).

Another partial solution would be to be able to assign a default screen to appear when you click to enter an application, such as Phone—regardless of where you last left it. For example, I could set things so that the keypad always appears when I click Phone, even if I was in the Contacts list when I last left Phone.

However, I believe that the overall best solution is to add two physical buttons to iPhone. These buttons would be placed to either side of the Home button. Ideally, I would make them a bit smaller and perhaps a different shape from the Home button, so that they could be easily distinguished from the Home button. Now, when you are in the iPod application, the Home button would act as a Pause/Play button (you’d need to double-click the Home button to actually go home or wake-up a sleeping iPhone). The other two buttons would act as fast forward/skip and fast rewind/restart buttons, mimicking the touch screen buttons for these actions. The three physical buttons would work this way even if the screen was asleep, saving you the need to wake up and unlock the phone just to skip a song.

When in any other mode, the Home button acts as a Home button (no change from how it now works). The left button would act as a Keypad button; that is, pressing it would instantly bring up the phone keypad, no matter where you currently were. The right button would be user-definable, allowing you to assign any screen you wanted as the one that would instantly appear. These extra buttons would also work to wake-up iPhone. So, for example, to get to the keypad from a sleeping iPhone, you would just press the keypad button and swipe to unlock the phone. Done.

Yes, this gets away from the simplicity of a single button. But Apple managed to abandon the single-button mouse and still survive. I think iPhone would survive additional buttons as well. At least for myself, I would actually prefer it.

Given my interest in troubleshooting Macs (I wrote the book on the subject, so to speak), it should come as no surprise that I have been spending a chunk of my “iPhone time” exploring how to troubleshoot the device.

For starters, all iPhone users should download the iPhone User’s Guide. It’s a much more comprehensive manual than the skimpy little piece of paper that comes with iPhone itself. It includes an entire chapter on “Tips and Troubleshooting.” In addition, check out Apple’s iPhone Support site, which has links to a wide assortment of more detailed troubleshooting advice. Finally, for advice on maximizing the battery life of your iPhone, check out Apple’s iPhone Battery page. Beyond Apple, the best source for iPhone troubleshooting is probably iPhone Atlas (disclaimer: This site is run by the people who also run MacFixIt, the site I started and still have an association with).

With that out of the way, here are are a collection of troubleshooting tips that I consider to be the most critical and interesting to know:

• iPhone crashes. Have you ever been working in an app or widget on your iPhone, when it suddenly vanishes and gets replaced by the Home screen? What happened is that the application crashed. This is the equivalent of what happens on a Mac when an application “unexpectedly quits” and dumps you back to the Finder.

Why does it crash? Well, given that Apple has virtually locked down iPhone so that you cannot modify its contents in any way, beyond the limited methods that Apple has provided, the typical cause is a bug in Apple’s software that Apple will eventually have to fix. If you are using Safari, it’s also possible that a Web page that is incompatible with iPhone could trigger a crash.

Speaking of crashing iPhones and Safari, the Web browser is undoubtedly the single most common place where you are likely to see a crash. In most cases, there is nothing much you can do to prevent the crash from recurring. However, if the crashes appear to be happening at random times within Safari, and with increasing frequency, you may be able to get rid of them, at least temporarily, by restarting your iPhone. To do this, hold down the Sleep/Wake key until the Power Off slider appears. Then Power Off and restart. If you can’t get the Power Off slider to appear for any reason, try holding down the Sleep/Wake and Home keys at the same time, until iPhone powers off.

Similar to the result of restarting a Mac, this clears iPhone’s memory, which (to put it in non-technical terms) winds up eliminating problems resulting from too much going on with too little memory to do it all.

Another way you might prevent persistent Safari crashes is to clear its cache. To do so, go to Settings>Safari and press Clear Cache. I wouldn’t worry too much that this will slow down the loading of Web pages that would otherwise load from the stored cache. I have never seen a Web page load from cache, even when using Safari’s Back button to return to the immediately previous page. It’s one of the many things that Apple should fix in an update.

A final note on crashes. If anything on iPhone does crash, you will get a message about it the next time you sync your iPhone with your Mac via iTunes. The message states: “Your iPhone contains diagnostic information which may help Apple improve its products.” Similar again to the Mac’s “Unexpectedly Quit” dialog, there will be a Send to Apple button. The actual crash data gets stored on your Mac in the /Library/Logs/Crashreporter/MobileDevice/{name of iPhone} folder. The “MobileSafari” .crash log files can be viewed via the Console utility. Note: There is also a MobileSafari property list (.plist) file that is temporarily stored in this folder; it appears to be deleted after you dismiss the dialog.

• iPhone freezes. If the iPhone stops responding to any of your touchscreen presses or button pushes, it may be “frozen.” The simple solution here is to press and hold the Home key for about six seconds. With luck, this should return you to the Home screen, with everything working again.

• Reset/Restore your iPhone. If none of the above can resolve a problem you are having, and you believe that the cause is related to some problem with the data on your iPhone (as opposed to a bug in Apple’s software), your last resort is to reset the iPhone. To do this, navigate to Settings>General>Reset. You have two main options here: “Reset All Settings” and “Erase All Content and Settings.” The first option is less severe. In general, it erases preferences settings you created on iPhone, but not data you entered that is synced with your Mac (such as Address Book contacts). After doing this, you would likely start recreating settings yourself directly on iPhone. Hopefully, whatever problem you were having would now be gone.

If even that doesn’t work, the “Erase All…” option removes both your settings and data. Typically, after this option, you will want to restore (a hopefully non-problematic copy) of the erased data back to your iPhone. Or you may simply decide to start over, as if you just took your iPhone out of the box. In either case, you will be looking at restoring your iPhone from iTunes. Based on some poking around on my own and some reading of other articles on the Web, I am fairly certain that this is how this all works:

To restore your iPhone, click the Restore button from the iPhone Summary screen. You may want to first click Check for Update to make sure you restore the latest version of iPhone’s software.

It is not clear to me why you might want/need to select to the “Erase All…” function on iPhone prior to doing this, as a Restore will also erase all data. The “Erase All…” option on iPhone allows you to erase data without restoring. Otherwise, I see little difference.

Anyway, after you erase your iPhone and restore its original Mac OS X software, the Mac will detect that you have a backup of your iPhone from a previous sync (assuming that you have done a previous sync). A dialog will appear at this point and ask whether you want to set up your iPhone as new or restore the contents from your backup. If you choose the latter, your iPhone should get stocked with everything that you had just erased. This would also be especially useful if you get a replacement iPhone in exchange for a defective one and want the replacement to have all the data and settings that were on the defective one.

[A few words about the backup: The name of the backup and when it was last updated can be found (even before connecting iPhone) by going to iTunes Preferences and selecting the iPhone icon. From this window, you can also click to Remove Backup, should you wish to start over with a fresh copy on the next sync (or if perhaps you sell your iPhone and will not longer need that particular backup).

In addition to backing up the data that you synced from your Mac, the backup also stores many of the iPhone settings. Apples states: “Automatically backed-up information includes text messages, notes, call history, contact favorites, sound settings, widget settings, certain network settings, and other preferences.” The backup does not include photo, video, songs, or email messages.

The actual sync data is located in your Home directory in two locations. First, and most critical, the backup information itself is stored in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup. The data here are what get deleted should you click the Remove Backup button in iTunes. Apparently, all data created on iPhone is stored here, including such things as your list of “Recents” in Google Maps and the notes you created in Notes. It is not in a form that you can easily access. However, enterprising users have written shell scripts (run via Terminal) that can extract the data to a more usable form. You can download one such script here.

Further sync information appears to be stored in yet another location: ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local. Here you will find a folder called clientdata. Inside this folder are a series of subfolders specific to each sync component maintained by your Mac (such as one each for .Mac, iSync and iPhone). The names of the folders are are series of hex characters of no obvious meaning. But inside each folder is a file named “clientname.txt.” Open this in any text editor to see what the folder’s sync device is. For iPhone, you want the folder with a clientname of MobileSync. There is data.syncdb file in this folder, which contains the actual synced data. There is an even larger data.syncdb file at the root level of the Local folder. Here is where things get a bit murky for me at the moment. I am not certain as to the significance of the two different data.syncdb files (are both files used by iPhone?). And how exactly does all of this work with the data in the MobileSync folder. Again, I am not quite sure. Further, none of the files here are anywhere near the size of the 4GB or 8GB of iPhone itself. So, there is no disk image being maintained. As I work out the answers here, I will update this posting or make a new one.]

• Manual vs. automatic sync. If you are having any problems with your iPhone, especially if you will be doing any sort of resetting/restoring, it’s probably best not to have it set to automatically sync when iTunes is launched. Otherwise, you may initiate a sync before you can perform some other needed operation (such as a restore). It’s also useful anytime there is data on your Mac that is scheduled to sync that you want to prevent from syncing at the moment.

To avoid automatic syncing, you have several options. The first is to disable the “Automatically sync when this iPhone is connected” option in the iPhone Summary screen (available by selecting iPhone from the Source list after the iPhone is connected to your Mac via its USB cable). The problem with this approach is that the iPhone must be connected before you can disable it. That’s why you are better off going to the iPhone tab of iTunes’ Preferences and select “Disable automatic syncing for all iPhones.” This overrides the first option. That is, even if you have selected to Automatically Sync from the Summary screen, it will not have an effect if the Preferences option is enabled. Finally, if you hold down the Command-Option keys when launching iTunes until iPhone appears in the Source list, automatic syncing will be prevented for that one time only.

To initiate a manual sync at any time, just click the Sync button from the iPhone screen in iTunes.

On a related note, there may be times when you want a sync to go only in one direction. That is, rather than merging the data on iPhone with the data on your Mac, you may want to replace the data on your iPhone with a fresh copy from your Mac. You can easily do this for Contacts, Calendars, Mail Accounts and/or Bookmarks by going to iPhone’s Info tab and scrolling down to the Advanced section. There you will see the various “replace” options.

If there is a conflict between entries on iPhone vs. your Mac (such as if you changed a phone number for the same person on iPhone and Mac, using different numbers in each case, and there is no way for the Mac to tell which one is now correct), Mac OS X’s Conflict Resolver will launch when you attempt to sync. It will walk you through each conflicting entry and allow you to choose which version you want to keep (the one on the Mac or the one on iPhone). However, I had at least one occasion where this did not work out well. Conflict Resolver kept relaunching with each sync, reporting the same conflicts, even after I resolved them. In this case, using the Advanced option described above to replace the data on iPhone should get the Resolver to stop bothering you (hopefully the data on your Mac contains the desirable variation at least in most cases).

To cancel a sync in progress, drag the slider on iPhone. If you get a call during a sync, the sync is canceled automatically, allowing you to unplug iPhone to answer the call. To finish syncing, just reconnect iPhone after your call is done.

As with the million or so others that have had the chance to play with their iPhones over the last week or two, I now have formed my first overall impression of the device. I call it the beginning of my “love-dislike” relationship with iPhone.

“Love” — because where the iPhone excels (and it does so in many places), it excels so spectacularly well that it is hard to imagine ever again using any other phone. “Dislike” — because “hate” would be too strong a word to describe anything as good as iPhone. Still, there are definitely things not to like about it. Fortunately, they are almost all eminently fixable and I suspect Apple is already working on doing so. Many of them will likely be addressed via software updates arriving in the next few months.

This mildly conflicting reaction is reminiscent of how I felt after I purchased an original Macintosh back in 1984. And that’s a good thing overall. From the moment I took the Mac out of its box, I knew I was in the presence of a machine that would initiate a paradigm shift in computers; that’s how different it was from the typical PC of the time. Yet, there were also times when I just wanted to kick it because of what it couldn’t do (as one example, I couldn’t even get an external floppy drive until several months after I got the Mac). But the problems were eventually fixed and the good things kept getting better. If Apple can pull the same trick with iPhone, and I believe they will, Apple will have succeeded in capturing lightning in a bottle yet again.

As to the specifics, the “dislikes” are pretty much what I expected from what I knew about iPhone before purchasing it (I even noted several of these annoyances on a previous blog entry). The most annoying are the ones where iPhone is unable to do things that even my old clunky basic mobile phone could easily do. This includes a laundry list of items such as voice dialing and custom ringtones. Next, are things that are just more hassle to do than they should be, especially given Apple’s otherwise great design of iPhone. As one example, I already find myself getting irritated at how many extra clicks I have to make to pause a song I am listening to on iPhone’s speakers, if I leave the iPod application while the song is playing. I have to click to return home, then click to reaccess the iPod application, then click to pause. It’s much simpler—just one click—on any standard iPod (or on iPhone with the headphones plugged in; you just press the remote button on the headphone cord). Plus, if I pause a song, and shift out of the iPod application, the odds go way up that the song will be “forgotten” when I return. It happens to me about 50% of the time. On the plus side, the fact that I even have the ability to listen to songs over iPhone’s built-in speakers, something no other iPod can do, is quite convenient (even given the inferior quality of the sound).

The keyboard in portrait mode is too small, at least for my fat fingers. I make too many typing mistakes and I don’t think this will get better with more practice. The one trick I did find to be helpful is to hold down but not release my finger from a key, until I see the letter “pop up.” If it is incorrect, I can slide my finger to the correct key. If I lift my finger before doing this, it is too late. I have to delete and re-enter the letter.

Speaking of my fat fingers, perhaps my biggest frustration with iPhone is how often I select something unintentionally—either because two active buttons are too close together or because I intended to scroll but iPhone interpreted it as a click. The result, in either case, is I have to back track to where I was before. This is especially annoying in Safari, as clicking to go Back does not immediately reload the previous page, even though Apple claims that Safari is maintaining a cache just for this purpose. I instead have to wait for the page I was just viewing to load again.

Speaking of typing, iPhone could really use a decent text editor with a to-do list function, something that allows copy-and-paste and that syncs to your computer when you sync the iPhone. The Notes widget doesn’t make the grade.

But why dwell on the downsides of iPhone when there is so much to love about it?

Google Maps is fantastic, even without built in GPS. My wife and I were driving around the other day when we realized that we were near a restaurant that we had been meaning to try. The only problem was that we couldn’t recall its exact location. I pulled out my iPhone and, in a few seconds, I not only had the address but driving directions. As a bonus, the map even showed me the current traffic levels on the major highways. How cool is that?

On another occasion, I wanted to look up a word in the dictionary. Again, I just pulled out iPhone, went to dictionary.com in Safari and presto, I had my definition. I’ve read many reviews commenting on ways in which iPhone’s version of Safari is less than perfect. I guess it depends on where you started from. In my case, I started from a basic phone that had virtually no Web access at all. Now, I can read the front page of the New York Times from my phone, almost as easily as I can from my desktop Mac. It’s fantastic. The limitations are trivial by comparison.

The iPhone’s 2.0 megapixel camera is more than adequate for me. I have heard others complain that it has no zoom function and no video capability. Heck, I don’t intend to use it as a substitute for my Canon camera. I am just happy that it takes much much better quality pictures than my old phone (which had only a 1.3 megapixel camera). Plus, the photos can be transferred to my Mac with much greater ease than with my old phone (although I wish the Mac could remember what I have downloaded and not ask to re-import the same photos each time I sync). It’s also quite nifty to assign a photo to a contact, so that the photo appears when the person calls you.

As for video, it goes without saying (although I’ll say it anyway) that watching a movie on iPhone is a far more enjoyable experience than watching on an iPod with video.

Last, but certainly not least, there are all the great finishing touches Apple has put into the interface and design of iPhone. Combine that with the large multi-touch screen, which provides a much easier way to navigate than the methods on a traditional mobile phone, and you have a device that is simply a joy to use. Even for something as basic as making a phone call, I often find myself smiling at how much fun it makes an otherwise mundane task. For one example, if a friend of mine has 4 different phone numbers in my contact database (work, home, mobile and fax), selecting the one I want to use is as easy as one finger tap. Editing the contact info is far easier and faster as well.

And of course, the ability to flick or expand/shrink the screen with your fingers simply must be tried to truly appreciate what a marvel of engineering it is.

I have only been using iPhone for 3 days. It took me a week to decide to get one this soon. But I am already glad I did not delay any longer.

I don’t own an iPhone yet. There I have said it.

It’s been difficult for me to resist the purchase. I am an admitted techno-geek who enjoys being on the cutting edge of the next big thing. And the iPhone certainly qualifies on that count. Although I know that the phone does not live up to its hype (what could?!), it is still undeniably cool. It is also my job to write about technology; so I could easily justify purchasing an iPhone as a business expense. Actually, I almost feel compelled to get one so that I can keep pace with my journalist competitors who already have one in their hands.

So why don’t I own one already?

First, once I get past marveling at the elegance of the phone, I am not sure how practical I will find it for my particular lifestyle. Normally, I carry a mobile phone with me at all times. It’s small, compact, and convenient, and I don’t worry if it gets a little scratched or not. That’s perfect for me. Do I really want a significantly bigger and heavier phone that I need to be more cautious about damaging? I am not sure.

Second, I don’t often carry an iPod with me. I have both an iPod nano and an iPod with video. Typically, I use the iPod with video for major trips, where I want to have my full library of music with me—including all my videos, photos, and games. I use the iPod nano when I am taking a short trip in my car, or the BART to San Francisco, or a bike ride—and all I need is quick access to my most favored music. The iPhone is not ideal for either use. It can’t substitute for an iPod with video, due to its 8GB storage limit and inability to work with iPod games. It works okay as a nano substitute, although it is still larger than my mobile phone and nano combined!

Another consideration is that, if I want my iPhone to always be available as an iPod, I should ideally always have a set of headphones with me. Yes, I can listen on the phone’s built-in speakers, but they are too soft and tinny-sounding to be satisfactory in most cases. So an iPhone would “force” me to regularly carry around an extra peripheral (headphones) that I now only occasionally take with me. Otherwise, I lose some of the convenience of the phone’s built-in iPod. I could still play iPhone through my car stereo, even without headphones. But that assumes that the device I use to connect the iPod to my car’s speakers is compatible with iPhone (some are; some are not). Otherwise, I have to wait for the updated version of my connector device to get released and then pay yet more money to buy it. Which brings me to a related point: I don’t use the headphones that come with my iPods. I have more expensive, better-quality ones. The problem here is that, due to the recessed headphone jack, many third-party headphones require an adapter to work with the iPhone (which is yet another purchase-in-waiting). Plus, as of now, only the official iPhone headphones include the remote control and built-in microphone that make it convenient to take a phone call while you are listening to music. This means I either have to sacrifice sound quality and go with Apple’s headphones or sacrifice the convenience of being able to easily switch from music to a phone call. The bottom line here is that rushing to get iPhone today means an inevitable waiting game for the peripheral updates yet-to-come plus the added expense of buying them.

Next, there are the admitted limitations of iPhone itself. The most serious, for me, is the slow EDGE network. One of my major intended uses of iPhone is as a Web browsing device. Reviews have said that iPhone can take several minutes to load one Web page via an EDGE connection. That just isn’t gonna cut it for me.

I am also a bit concerned about hassles coordinating my POP account email between iPhone and my home computer. That is, I want to make sure that any email I receive to or send from iPhone will also get copied to my computer at home. I am assuming that this is possible even with a POP (as opposed to an IMAP) account, but I am still unclear as to exactly how to do it.

Then there are the really irritating omissions, those things that I can do with my current mobile phone and iPod, but cannot do with iPhone. Here’s just a partial list of such items: no voice dialing, no custom ringtones, no games, no ability to send photos directly to another phone, no “disk mode” (that allows the iPhone to act as a hard drive when connected to the Mac).

Sure, the iPhone has many wonderful qualities to compensate for these downsides. But you already know that from all the hype heaped upon the device. I’m just calling attention to what you may find disappointing if you get one. This is not meant to be a review or to strive for balance.

It may be better to wait at least a few weeks for this dust to settle before bringing an iPhone home. The good news here is that, as iPhone is running on Mac OS X, many of the currently missing features will be able to be added simply as a software upgrade. You won’t have to buy a new iPhone to get them!

Still, this does raise the larger question: Should you wait for the inevitable version 2.0 of iPhone, which I am speculating may be out as early as January 2008. This major revision should address almost all the user complaints with the current version. I would hope for it to include, in addition to whatever software-only upgrades can provide, support for a faster Internet network, built-in GPS, better support for third-party software, and perhaps even more memory and a removable battery.

Overall, if money is not a primary concern, and you can live with the peripherals hassles and minor irritations described here, there is no need to wait. Get an iPhone today and start enjoying it. You can always sell your 1.0 version and switch to the 2.0 version when it comes out. That way, you get the use of the 1.0 version immediately for a net cost of around $200—$300 (depending upon what you can sell it for later). And you can keep using your older iPod(s) for those situations where the iPhone doesn’t cut it.

Otherwise, unless you have a burning need or desire to get an iPhone immediately, I would recommend waiting for the 2.0 version. You’ll be happier in the end. Of course, I probably won’t be able to wait that long. But that’s what I would recommend that you do.

UPDATE: July 7: I gave in and bought an iPhone yesterday. On balance, I am glad I did. More details later.