I’m coping well, thank you.

(No, not with the heat. We had a big afternoon of thunderstorms and since Thursday, all of New England has been nicely air-conditioned.)

It’s a sad state of affairs, but our proud nation is now chockablock with people who’ve had 41 minutes of stick time with a functioning iPhone. Many, in fact, have had even more experience than I had when I got to play with one back when the planet was somewhat younger. So it’s plain to see that the gravy train has pulled into the station and my ability to get people to buy me free dinners in exchange of my thrilling and colorful tales of how FARK.com renders in the iPhone browser has dropped down to damned-near nothing.

This is no small problem. Remember that I’m a freelance journalist. I make more money than a grad student but still, when a public schoolteacher tools by in her 1994 Toyota, I look on wistfully and scramble gratefully after whatever small coins she may toss out through her window.

But don’t worry about me. I can still afford Cup-O-Soup and as soon as my alpha account of Google 2 goes active, I’ll be lobstering like Gatsby.

Onward. Ever since the iPhone was announced, I’ve been joyous and outspoken about the iPhone’s potential. It made one hell of a first impression and every piece of information I picked up since then made me even more eager to leave my test flight behind and use an iPhone as a commuter vehicle.

My official Sun-Times review won’t run until Thursday (www.suntimes.com...aren’t you a dear for asking), and later this week, my brother-in-punditry will offer his own full review here at iPodObserver.com. Suffice to say that it will be quite positive and will do little to dispel the notion amongst the radical Windows factions that I’ve named my yacht "Cupertino ’s Kitty."

(Again I refer you to the generic-brand diet cola to the left of my keyboard.)

Until then, I’ll dive into the various qualms, concerns and questions that I’ve jotted down after my first full day with the thing. In no particular order:

The Headphone Jack. There simply aren’t enough letters in "WTF" for this one. It uses a standard headphone jack -- well done, I’m sick of having to carry around an adapter for my smartphone -- but the jack is recessed behind a shroud that’s so small that of the eight or nine sets of headphones in my office, the only two that fit are the ones that came with the iPhone...and the ones that came with my fourth-generation iPod a few years ago.

Nope, my way-cool noise-cancelling headphones are no good. Neither is my car adapter. In a fit of pique, I finally heated up an X-Acto with a torch and shaved down a spare car adapter so it’d fit. As I did so, I imagined that it was the pinky toenail of whatever engineer came up with that idea.

Not being able to use my existing accessories is frustrating (yes, I can use an adapter but let’s not distract ourselves from a good fume), but what truly gets me is that this isn’t a subtle, shocking problem. This should have been manifestly obvious the moment the first iPhone hit the field.

(Or the second. Steve Jobs had the first one. I imagine that he pays someone to listen to his iPhone for him and then speak the lyrics to him.)

So: barring a hugely brilliant explanation, Apple knew that this was a problem, knew that there was a simple solution (make the shroud wider), and knew that this would cause humongous hassle to people who would (pardon my language, ladies) be horny for their iPhone but barred from taking it out for a drive.

More Bluetooth Profiles, Please. As far as I can tell, the only things the Bluetooth transceiver can talk to is a headset or a car handsfree kit. Compare and contrast with a Sony phone that costs $99 with activation. The thing can share files, pictures and contacts with other Bluetooth devices, use an external keyboard, use a stereo wireless headset, control my Mac...

By comparison, the iPhone’s Bluetooth is barely robin’s-egg colored. It doesn’t even show up as a mobile phone when I look for discoverable devices on my MacBook.

This isn’t dopey like the earphone jack thing. There might be a technical reason for the omission; one of the main goals of the iPhone is to make it the first truly stable smartphone on the market, and part of that will be to limit external hardware until various kinks are straightened and rubbed with aromatic herbs. But still, it’s odd that I can’t even beam contacts...and not being able to do file transfers back and forth hurts.

I suppose I shouldn’t expect that, though...after all...

No Disk Mode? Really? It’s a feature that dates back to the very first deck-o-cards FireWire iPod. It was also the only way to move Notes onto the device. "Well, we’ve removed the ’notes as files’ feature," Apple says. "So, problem solved!"

Not really. Because although 4 and even 8 gigs of storage doesn’t seem like much, there’s certainly enough free space after music, videos, and pictures for a folder of critical documents. More than once in my life, a Bad Day was averted by the realization that (thank God) I had a copy of (whatever it was) on my iPod.

Clearly, Apple didn’t want the iPhone to be exposed as a standard USB file device, which would leave it open to lots of Clever New Little Apps. But it’s a sad omission. When I wrote iPod: Fully Loaded (a book on how to convert anything you’ve got in life into a file or a format that can be used on your iPod - US$13.59 - Amazon) half of the tricks exploited Notes and Disk Mode. Just to (a) tell you how handy and powerful those features are, and (b) to plug my book.

And on that subject...

iTunes is the sole gatekeeper for data on this thing. Which is starting to get a little bit obnoxious. If Apple either didn’t consider that you’d want to put it on your phone, or didn’t think it was in your or the phone’s best interest, then the iPhone will jam its hands over it ears and sing the "I’m Not LIS-TENING Song" over and over again until you stop trying.

It’s one aspect of my previous phone (a Windows Mobile device) that I miss. It had a media player but it didn’t care how stuff landed on the phone. If I wanted to use Windows Media to organize, manage, and sync music and video, fine. A third party utility? No prob. I have a Mac, and simply want to move stuff on there manually? No skin of its nose.

This is a problem with all iPods, not just the iPhone, but we might be teetering on that line between "iTunes limits my choices, but it leads to a healthier device and it does everything I’d want to do manually, anyway" and "I have no control over this thing I’ve just paid $500 for." Time will tell which way the body falls.

You Can Only Sync Via USB. Oy.

Oy!

(slaps head)

OY!

My apologies to my Jewish brothers and sisters for appropriating your cultural heritage -- but if my four-year-old Sony phone could sync contacts and appointments without forcing me to play America’s least-loved game show, "Find The Cable," then why can’t the iPhone? I don’t want to sync 400 megs of new podcasts wirelessly and frankly, I probably wouldn’t want to. I just want to know where the hell my meeting is today.

You Can’t "Save" Anything. So Apple doesn’t want me to put my own files on the iPhone. Okay, but when I’m looking at a webpage chock-full of important info, why can’t I "save" it out of the mail database so that it simply becomes a bit of Information that I can call upon whenever I need it? When I come across a webpage that has a vital directory of a trade show I’m about to attend, why can’t I just save that page locally instead of (a) having to keep it open in Safari (which can only keep a limited number of pages open) or (b) counting on being able to find either WiFi or a couple of bars of EDGE inside the convention hall?

Answer: because where would you "save" it to? The iPhone would need to have a general viewer and manager app (something akin to Preview) which turns this into a Whole ’Nother Thing.

The User Interface Could Probably Be Friendlier To Folks With Poor Vision This isn’t a problem so much as a missed opportunity. This is a muscular device with a hell of a nice OS and it seems like it’d be easy to include a Magoo Mode -- in which all text and controls are enlarged, or maybe just a universal magnifying glass tool like the one that comes up when you need to move the edit cursor in a text field). It’d make the device usable by more people.

No "Back" Button. I have a sneaking suspicion that the iPhone experience would benefit from a permanent, fixed onscreen button that always means "Take Me Back To The Last Place." Many times during my first day, I found myself instinctively reaching for one.

This phantom "Back" control is represented by the buttons that appear in a bar at the top of the screen when you’re in the middle of a process.

Oh, and about that...

The Top Deck Of Buttons Isn’t Quite Right. You’re composing an email, or creating a new Bookmarks folder or a new contact or anything, really, that involves a chain. A new bar appears at the top of the screen with two buttons. On the right side is a logical "forward" button ("I’ve given you all the info you need; now go off and do it, please"); on the left, a "Back" ("Forget it...just cancel" or "Cool list, thanks. Now take me back to where I was.")

Somethin’ ain’t right here.

First, the buttons themselves ought to be bigger. they’re the "action" buttons that you must push to proceed, and yet they’re typically smaller than the static, app-specific functions at the bottom. Secondly, I’m convinced that in a handheld user-interface, "more important" equals "bottom of the screen"...i.e., where your fingers naturally "want" to go and don’t have to reach.

One reason for the button bar’s placement is that it puts the "back" button underneath the thumb of the hand holding the iPhone. That’s convenient. Still...mmm...the whole arrangement feels a little beta.

Whoops, it’s just occurred to me that it’s the Sunday before July 4 and you might be barbecuing. Why don’t you give those steaks a turn and come back a little later for the rest of my list.