My gripe with the wife's iPhone is that it's "simple and easy to use" in the way Apple wants you to use it. Stray off their path and it's a b!tch.
Great device for non-technically inclined people (like my wife), but when one is used to having full control of their system using an iPhone is frustrating.
Example: my wife would like to have a copy of our vacation pictures (taken with a digital camera) on her iPhone. No problem, I think; there's a DCIM/100Apple folder on the phone visible when I plug it into my Ubuntu machine. Oh, except the iPhone by itself will not scan that folder for pictures; it uses sqlite to track the photos so unlike inexpensive digital cameras, one can't simply copy digital images onto the phone. Ditto with digital music. In both cases one must do the transfer via iTunes which means my PC must do some of the heavy lifting for the iPhone.
Good for some, I guess.
I like that when I take a picture on the iPhone, it’s available on the computer. When I plug a digital camera into iPhoto and upload some, or drop some photos onto iPhoto, the photos are available on the iPhone.
No iTunes, no syncing, but the Photo Stream feature of iCloud.
Yeah, too easy I guess.
The problem many people have with Apple is that we’re used to doing things the hard way. Why should we be looking for a DCIM folder? Why should we even have to know what that folder is or why it’s named that, what’s a THM file, why there’s a WAV file in my photos folder, etc. I had this problem in the beginning installing an UPS — that I could just plug it in and it would automatically work didn’t occur to me after having recently installed the same model on the Windows box.