(Okay, the menus? Sure. But I’ve owned Motorola products, too, and unless the RAZR was the one standout and you got lucky, the “bad menu design” thing is ubiquitous.

The iPhone is the first phone I ever saw that didn’t have that problem. Android and Windows Phone 7 learned that lesson very, very well, for the most part.)

I think it’s that either they or AT&T didn’t make it quite clear enough that it’s a music player as much as a phone.

Though I suppose the “Walkman” in the extended name really ought to have been a hint, there.

(And the Media Store lockin on the button? That’s AT&T’s doing, not Sony Ericsson’s.

AT&T, like every carrier, tries to do that as much as possible on every phone they can; the best thing about the iPhone is that Apple refuses to let them.

As to why there’s no “just phone, SMS, and alarm” phone, it’s because that’s not actually that popular a set of options, restricted as it is.

[Though I suspect you could get a prepaid phone that did pretty much just that, or at least did everything else so poorly you wouldn't bother.]

A whole lot of people want music on the go, and it turns out that a lot of people also don’t want to carry an extra device.

In my case, for instance, my iPhone has completely supplanted my iPod Classic, despite over an order of magnitude less music being on it.

I suspect that in that I am closer to a typical user than you are – and atypical users don’t find their needs catered to, sadly.)

Craig Hunter cites the Blackberry Media Sync software as an effective utilization of Apple’s open XML format for iTunes media. Kudos to Apple for making this an option for users with hardware and software Apple didn’t create. Let us make no mistake, however, the Blackberry Media Sync is rubbish, particularly for Mac users who are stuck with a Blackberry, and Hunter shouldn’t have cited it as a good example of the Apple XML format in practice.

First, the Media Sync software was released several years after it should have been and left many Blackberry users without a way to sync to their Macs. Second, it has very limited portability options for your iTunes media when syncing playlists vs. individual songs. Third, it trumps the PocketMac for Blackberry program (another wretched piece of software that fails to effectively and efficiently sync with iTunes), which is the only option for Mac users who wish to attempt to sync media, address book and calendar information. In fact, when you first install the Media Sync you get a warning that PocketMac will no longer work while Sync is installed. This has forced me to constantly install Media Sync when I want new iTunes music on my crappy Curve, and subsequently uninstall Sync when I need PocketMac to work to update my contacts with my computer’s address book.

Perhaps, there are people who are more talented with software manipulation who may know a workaround for this. That said, I’m pretty handy with my computer and portable electronics and as an informed consumer there are no obvious solutions to what is clearly an awful way to sync media. Furthermore, why should I have to know a workaround to fully utilize my phone’s features? Ultimately, while Apple has provided ways for other developers to access iTunes media on their respective hardware devices, there remain shortcomings on a variety of other popular smartphones. The Pre appears to suffer here, but Blackberry’s popular phones and their Media Sync are no exception.