I tested iTunes Match on my PC at work and, though I will never really use it, it is pretty cool. Most of my playlists are available and I can listen to pretty much all of my music at work now, if I wanted. I prefer listening to music on my phone at work so I won’t use this much. If I did listen to iTunes at work on my PC, this would be the greatest use of $25 ever.

I planned on using iTunes Match for my iPhone, not my work PC so I went into settings to turn it on. When I did, I saw this message:

iTunes Match Warning

That was the end of that experiment.

I read later that the message is a lie (which means it should not be there) and that your existing music won’t be erased from the phone. However, it apparently prevents you from syncing with iTunes on your PC afterwards, so no thanks.

Besides the obvious limitations above that will keep me from using this, there are a few other things that bother me:

• “Matching a user’s iTunes library in the cloud take minutes, not days or weeks,” Apple says. While this is technically true, over 1/3 of my music was not matched and had to be uploaded. This took days, not minutes.
• Smart playlists based on other smart playlists will not work in iTunes Match. This kills my main playlists on my phone and is almost a dealbreaker. It isn’t a dealbreak by itself but turning on iTunes Match for my phone means I can’t sync my main playlists anymore at all. That is a dealbreaker.
• Adding music (when ripping CDs) doesn’t automatically add them to iTunes Match. Not sure if it runs on a schedule or not but I ripped a CD then added those tracks to my stepson’s playlist and was told that the tracks weren’t in iTunes Match so adding them to the playlist would remove the playlist. Weird and lame.

Also, what is going on with these icons? Steve Jobs must be rolling over in his grave right now. (Note: these are on my work machine, the ‘close left panel’ icon doesn’t exist on my home machine.)

GarageBand on iPhone is impressive. They managed to make it support everything the iPad version does, but intelligently hid a lot of things in menus so there is enough room on the screen.

The piano keyboard is small (tiny!) but the drums may actually be a little easier to play for me than they are on iPad.

The fact that the phone supports a full 8-track digital recorder with smart instruments, effects, drum machine, etc, etc, etc, is (very!) impressive but I may actually be more impressed with how we they minified the UI.

Plus, with DiskAid (or a similar app), I was able to move a garageband project from ipad onto the iphone and it all worked perfectly.

Worst new feature: Playlist order is broken again.

Other things I’ve noticed:

• Location-based reminders are apparently only on iPhone 4S. I can set a reminder for a time but not a location.
• I hide all of my unused Apple apps in 1 folder on the last page of my homescreens to keep them out of my way. You can’t put the Newsstand app in a folder so that empty ass bookcase is going to be staring at me every time I visit the barren wasteland of my last homescreen.
• Smart Playlists now update correctly again. Since iOS 4, they wouldn’t live update on my phone (i.e. playing a song on the “unplayed” playlist should make the song disappear from the playlist without having to sync but that didn’t work since iOS 4).
• Playlists aren’t ordered correctly now. Playlists that start with numbers come after playlists that start with letters. Underscores are ignored.
• The new Notifications alone make the upgrade worth it. Yeah, the upgrade is free but still, those old notifications were the shittiest thing I’ve ever seen on a phone.
• The notifications area has weather and stocks, too. Neato.
• If your Apple ID is just a username and not an email address, you’ll have to change that when you first start your phone after upgrading. If you also have a MobileMe address and want to use that as your  Apple ID, you’re going to have some weirdness because you have to use your MobileMe address to sign in to your phone but then your old non-email Apple ID to sign in to the iTunes Store and GameCenter.
• I can’t use iCloud yet because I have a MobileMe account that needs to be moved to iCloud first and I can’t do that yet.
• Syncing no longer disables your phone. Instead of the screen being on with a “Sync in Progress” message at the top, there is just a small sync icon spinning in the status bar up top. Your phone screen will go black if you sync it and let it sit. This caused me to unplug it once in the middle of a sync because I assumed it was finished.
• The messaging/SMS app has greens where the blues should be. Lame.

For the next week, I’ll still be using my iPhone 4 so I can’t play with Siri or the location-based notifications yet. That should be some fun (and/or annoying) features to test. Maybe I’ll even use them later, who knows.  I’m still not in the habit of using Search homescreen to find things on the phone.

[UPDATE: Sean Herrala pointed out that you can add location-based reminders in the Reminder app on iPhone 4 but you have to add it as a Reminder, not a Task. I didn't have a Reminders section in the app, only Tasks, so I added a new section called "Reminders" and then items I added had location-based reminders available. Weird. Sounds like a bug to me.  Also, when adding a location-based reminder, you are limited to locations that are in your contact list. In all of the Siri demos, they say things like "remind me to get milk at the grocery store", I wonder if that guy has a contact called "Grocery Store" or something...]

There are only 10 photos in the set. I would have taken more but I am afraid to take my camera onto the beach. Click any of the links above to see the rest.

Bonus pic: Marisa in the water, taken with my iPhone (encased in an Aquapac waterproof case)

and was glad to see someone else putting it to good use… It is the same cloth used on this sofa, as seen in the window of Neiman Marcus Last Call at Discovery Mills in Georgia.

I had to upgrade my wordpress installation and it mangled my categories, lost their titles. I added them back but I guess there are still problems. When I click “categories” on this app while writing an entry, it crashes. So, like the doctor said, I guess I won’t do that. Will use tags instead. That’s the preferred way to label things these days anyway, right?