OT: Mobile contract up soon, and I'm tempted by an Omnia.

I have - just waiting for the RAM to arrive!

Ok, it's next decade soon, but life's cheaper that way!

Try Songbird or Mediamonkey.

The only good thing about the iPhone is the UI, which I hate to admit is rather good. It has the best mobile browser of any phone.

Of course, the IMAP support, lack of replaceably battery, loss of 12V charging etc are a bit of a pain. And as a phone it's almost impossible to use without looking at it.

Turn off "organise my music", stop it turning everything to AACs (ALEs please!) and turn off auto-sync and it's very good. Why the hell it's such a big download I don't know.

iTunes works for many of the iPod generation, but for those of us with a more extensive collection, it's not brilliant, to be frank.

Media Monkey appears to rock by comparison.

A Mac of some description is on my list of machines to buy before I die.

I have what you'd call an 'extensive collection', in fact, it's more than 'extensive' and iTunes does a brilliant job of organising it, uploading it to my iPod, ripping it and making it easily available to any machine, including handheld devices, in the house.

Sounds familiar - it doesn't work as well for us, for whatever reason, which is why we use Media Monkey, which is almost as greedy as iTunes but makes it far easier to sync the four portable devices we most commonly use for music (one being an iPod). Other stuff accesses music via the NAS.

For me, iTunes makes sense if you have an iPod. I wouldn't put up with it otherwise, especially the Windows version.

As a media player It's slightly less objectionable than Windows Media Player, but not much.

I still needed iTunes to do the Jailbreak though, and like I said, I haven't got it any more.

Yea when I turned everything off auto mode, and told it to only Sync stuff I'd ticked it was alright, there was no way it could do harm, and even on full power it only takes a small chunk of my reasources anyway - but that's what they're there for. But it was still quicker to do with Winamp heh.

I had a Kodak 6340 (I think that's what it was) that took amazingly good photos, and was just a little 3.1mp or something. Unfortunatley it died on me in Vegas :-( I was gutted, cos it took the best point and shoot pics of any cam I've ever had - Fuji S5600 apart, but that's a bit 'big' for a point an shoot, arse to carry around, I only take it to like, car shows or whatever.

I replaced the Kodak with a Casio Exilim S-500 card - 5mp. The Kodak kicks the crap out of it picture quality wise in lower lights wise but the Casio can't be beaten for compactness. It's tiny, and cos of that you get a lot more photos than you normally would cos you take it more places. My brother has a Panasonic Lumix, a really new one, and it takes really fabulous pictures, it's loads bigger than the Exilim, but it's still pretty small. I'm thinking about getting one to replace the Fuji S5600, cos I never actually wanna take that anywhere it's so bulky.

I'll sell you my dirty mac and gartered trouser legs if you like?

One day maybe.... ;-)

For basic file transfers, from a 'normal' phone, the Mac will fire up image transfer so you can save the images to your hard drive - *if that's what you asked it to do the first time you plugged the device in*. However, if you have iPhoto installed, and have asked it to fire up iPhoto on plugging in an imaging device, then it will fire up iPhoto instead.

So, it's really simple - and as Doug has posted, you can browse a phone over Bluetooth, dragging and dropping to and from the phone. Something which appears to be impossible with XP, assuming you got XP and Bluetooth working in the first place.

The iPhone is a bit more than a simple phone, I only fiddled with mine for a few hours, but within an hour, I had it jailbroken, a stack of free applications on it and had it synchronising my phone book, calendar, music and photos with iTunes and iPhoto. It was also nicely synchronising all my email accounts.

If I hadn't jailbroken it, then I'd have plugged it in, been given the chance to update the firmware and then been able to sync. it with iTunes and iPhoto within 10 mins of taking it out of the box.

It was all *really* simple, so I'd suggest that your mate had ignored on-screen instructions and failed to RTFM before calling you for help.

Obviously, when you arrived, with your Windows knowledge, you'd have been expecting it to behave like a Windows box, and tied yourself in knots making the whole process more long winded and tricky than it was.

Using your K750i example above, the Mac way of doing it would be:

Click Bluetooth icon at top of screen and select either 'Browse Device' (at which point it would scan for a device to browse) or select an already known device and select 'browse'. You could then drag and drop to your heart's content.(I usually drop pics straight onto the iPhoto icon in the dock)

No faffing with a cable, no faffing with telling the computer you were going to disconnect. It 'just works' - so long as you don't approach it from a Windows perspective and expect it to be more complicated than it really is.....

I'm nipping round to his house in 10 mins or so, I'll try that.

I plugged it in and expected it to work. It didn't. Nothing Windoze about it.

Actually, I've just found out where the problem lies. User error. (No surprise there)

He's previously asked the Mac to open iPhoto if it encounters a digital camera, but not installed iPhoto....

I just checked the iPhone 'getting started' guide and found that the default behaviour is that, on plugging an iPhone into a Mac, Image Capture (or whatever it's called) will fire up and allow you to select which pictures you want to save to the Mac.

Obviously, if the computer has been set to import into iPhoto, but iPhoto isn't installed, then it's going to get a bit arsey about things.

So, how do I get it to do what I want? I don't know much about these Mac things.

Oh, and if anyone's bored, have a mooch around practical classics forum. I've been annoying that lot for months and I think you'd enjoy it.