"No way to create a playlist and select songs and put into it"

It is indeed possible to create "on-the-go" playlists on the iPhone, just go to iPod / Playlists / on-the-go and then edit / "+" and select the songs to add to the playlist. I just discovered it this morning...

So you can create and manage new playlists on the go? Or does the playlist have to have been created first through itunes before you edit it on the go?

As far as I found out this morning, you can only edit and manage this one "on-the-go" playlist. You can clear it, add songs, albums, podcasts, etc. Only that playlist shows the "Edit" button on the top right corner.

Now that the iPhone is available in so many more countries, and thus in so many more languages, I hope something can be done about support for "accented characters" and "compound words".

In my native language, Swedish, we have three additional characters in our alphabet: Å (aka "A with circle"), Ä ("A with two dots") and Ö ("O with two dots").

Even though they might seem to be accented versions of A and O, they are not. On computer keyboards they have their own keys and they are used very frequently in our language.
Having them being treated as accented characters, with the current accented character support, is not really ideal.....

If you try to write using "tap and hold" it slows down your typing a lot (the timer for bringing up the accented character list is simply too long, some kind of "option" key would have been better) since they are used so often.

To let the spell correction take care of it is not the best solution either. For instance, if you type "H", "A" and "R" it will match either the word "HAR" (have), the word "HÄR" (here) or the word "HÅR" (hair). In this case it is impossible for the iPhone to (always) be right. And if the proposed word you get is wrong, you have to go back and manually change the A to the correct character which, again, takes quite some time.

Separate keys for Å, Ä and Ö would be the best, but might mean the keys would be too small (except in landscape position, if that worked in all applications). Shorter "accented key timeout" could work, or perhaps preferably an option key to immediately get the accented character list when tapping a character that can have accents.

Second, compound words. In Swedish, as well as in Finnish and many other languages, it is possible to put two, or more, basic words together to make a compound word. Sometimes you just write it that way because it is customary, but often the compound word means something different than the two basic words. For instance, if you write the two words "brunhårig sjuksköterska" it means "brown haired nurse". If you separate them into the four basic words and write "brun hårig sjuk sköterska" it means "brown hairy sick female caretaker" which is quite different.

Since this can be done somewhat freely it is almost impossible to keep a dictionary with all the possibilities.

To get good proposals from the spell checker it would be an improvement if you could write the two basic words, without a space in between, and get a proposal on each of the parts. That is, write "brun", maybe tap "shift" and "space" to mark that the word is finished (without inserting a space character) and then continue to write "hårig" and have the iPhone understand that it is a new word even though there is no space before it.
The T9 text input found in other mobile phones supports this.

I would also love it if deleting a character while typing a word would not turn off the "word proposing" function of the spell checker....

Finally it would be great if shift and "backspace" would delete a whole word backwards. That would be really helpful.

Another good article overall, but this part:

I've seen a lot of posts about backups taking absurd amounts of time; like 20 to 30 minutes or more each time. Not sure what's prompting this lengthy process. Are those using a more recent firmware as in restoring from iTunes and getting the unpublished update? Is this happening on Windows boxes only? For me, I'm hooked to a PB and have equally 3.5GB of music and video each on a 16GB iPhone. My syncs only take a minute or two. I did notice yesterday it was taking longer and copying over 100 songs and then I realized it's copying my Most Recently Played playlist, so I ended up removing that from the playlists to sync. Sorry for your folks who are dealing with this.

http://picasaweb.google.nl/DanielJvd...71199551697522

Don't know if it has to do with AT&T but in the Netherlands we can choose other providers when roaming, I went to Belgium and France a few days ago, could easily change between Proximus, Base, Mobistar, Orange, Bouygues and SFR. So it's more of an US iPhone problem.

New software is sluggish and delays a lot between functions...at least on original iPhone...though I've heard it's so on 3G as well. Hope they fix it soon. The added functions aren't worth the ass dragging.

\ According to this article, there are so many fundamental smartphone things my Blackberry Pearl (and a basic model, at that) still does a million times better than the iPhone - things that are essential, rather than just fun - I was going to switch with 3G, but I'm going to wait longer:

- 30 seconds to turn on SMS? Are you frakking kidding me??? I can switch between and back and forth amongst phone, calendar, contacts, SMS - with data shared between them all - in literally the time it takes to push a button on my Blackberry.

- No cut & paste - a function I use a least a couple times a day in managing contacts and composing messages. Things I can do in 10 seconds would take 5 minutes without cut & paste. Such a basic computing function - it's not "whining" to point out a really fundamental gap in functionality.

- "Unusable" contacts app - what would the point of a smart phone be without a killer contacts app?

- Re-charge needed twice a day - like I could be bothered to do that now that I'm used to re-charging only once every _3_ days.

- iPhone "likely" to freeze up - my Blackberry has frozen maybe 4 times in the last year, and that was only because of a Google app.

- Tedious "back-up" every time it's plugged in? BlackBerry and my workplace Outlook are constantly in sync and the data ultimately live on my company's servers.

About the only thing that I do even occasionally on my BB that the iPhone 3G sounds like it actually does better is surf the web - it's slow and clunky on my BB with EDGE, but I only use it a few times a week and I consider it a luxury - mostly for looking up movie showtimes and winning a Wikipedia bet. Almost never use the web on my BB for work.

Why Apple would make a smart phone that does well at the less-essential functions but does poorly at basic functions, like SMS, is incomprehensible.