Well, I’ve had it for about 2 weeks now and I’m loving it. I’ve gotten over my “I hate iTunes” fit and things are working pretty smooth. During the iPhone/iTunes switch I decided to do away with her windows profile and just combined it with mine, mainly because I was tired of doing everything twice (setting up iTunes & Picasa3.)After a little work, I am happy to say I am syncing 2 iPhones to the same iTunes with different contacts and calendars while syncing to Outlook 07. It was pretty easy, I just had to create a group for each of us and import her contacts and calendar.  Anyway back to the phone. Lets start with “Things the iPhone doesn’t do.” (yet hopefully)iPhone 3g; firmware: 2.2; non-jailbroken (I know some of these things can be done to a jailbroke phone)

• Forward text messages
• Record video
• Send & receive mms
• Play .avi video files (or any other video file besides .mp4)
• Completely copy & paste through out the entire phone
• Transfer files via bluetooth
• Can only send 1 picture in an email

Ok, it seems you can overlook a lot when it does the things you like better than anything else.”Things I Like”

•  The App Store (I couldn’t imagine having an iPhone with out it)
• Mobile Safari (the best mobile browser I’ve used and I’ve tried everything for windows mobile)
• Google Maps with GPS (It freaking puts a dot where you are and it moves with you) <- that’s amazing
• Mail – I connect to my gmail and it really integrates well using Gmail’s imap
• Remote – this is an app that will connect you to your iTunes library and controls it on that local computer (really handy if you have a(few) airport express)
• As said before my wife has an iPhone too, and I installed Remember the Milk and linked both our phones to the same account so she can add my “honey-dos”

For those of you who are like me and ragged on the iPhone and now have one, I bet people are giving you that hard time back. Well I made a wallpaper to help me feel better and let mac users know where I stand. Feel free to download and use it yourself.

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Off to the internet I went searching for a better method of updating my library. I ran across a free program called the iTunes Library Updater (iTLU) and as of this writing and me using iTunes version 7 it is still working flawlessly. I have setup a custom profile inside of iTLU with the rules I want it to use when updating my library as well as telling the program where my iTunes library XML file and my music files are located. After a quick setup I was able to have it update my library in a matter of minutes and I didn’t have to worry about remembering which new albums I have added.

This method worked great for awhile, until I would forget to run the process so I did a little more digging to see how I could automate the process and basically take the human (me in this case) out of the equation. The genius who released iTLU also released a GUI free version of the software. What this does is allows you to use the built in Windows Scheduled Tasks program to run iTLU at a specified time which you can then setup to be a recurring task such as daily or weekly.

I opened up the user manual for iTLU and read through the steps and explanations of what switches I needed to use in order to process my library using the same settings I did with the GUI. But wait, I then noticed that since I had saved all of my settings from the GUI in a iTLU profile I didn’t have to do anything with the switches. All I needed to do is tell it where to find my profile file and it would automatically load in the saved settings. Awesome!

So now every 3 days this process kicks off somewhere between kissing the wife good night and that stupid alarm waking me up for work in the morning. The best part is I no longer get the “did you add that album to iTunes yet?” questions like I did before.