I have owned an iPhone 3GS for about nine months now and will be the first to admit that I love using it.  From day one I found it extremely easy to use and understand.  It was as if Apple personally sat with me and figured out exactly how I would want to use the phone and what I wanted it to do for me.  This phone has opened my eyes to the wonderful world of podcasts, audio books, Bluetooth connectivity with my car; not to mention fun activities like WordswithFriends.

However, with all of this love that I feel for the iPhone, I HATE using iTunes.  For some reason, all of the user-friendliness, intuitive operation and simple layout that the iPhone was programmed with, was lost on the group that programmed iTunes.  I find the simplest tasks in iTunes to be extremely time consuming and annoying.  The usual drag and drop feature that I’ve been programmed to understand from years of Microsoft based PC’s doesn’t work in iTunes.

For example, I recently downloaded an audiobook through iTunes for the first time.  Once it was done downloading, I wanted to transfer it over to my iPhone.  Naturally, I hit the Sync button to sync my iPhone with iTunes; nothing happened.   I try to drag and drop it over into my iPhone icon, nothing happens.   I spent the next 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get that one simple audiobook off my computer and onto my phone.  What I finally realized was that I had to go in and check a box to tell iTunes to sync audiobooks too.   Then I hit the Sync button and there goes the book over to the phone.

So, what’s my point with all of this?  I love using the iPhone and think the product development folks did a fabulous job at making it simple and intuitive.  However, I find the iTunes program to be extremely hard to use.  Maybe I shouldn’t have even bothered using my PC to download the book.  Maybe I should have just tried doing it through my iTunes app (which strangely enough I find to be very easy to use).  I think from now on I will avoid the PC based software at all cost and just do more surfing and purchasing from my phone…..or is that what they are trying to get me to do in the first place?