Where am I?

The 3 GS with iPhone OS 3.0.1 is good, but there are a few paper-cuts that I can't ignore. Naturally I've told Apple about these.

• Calendar and conference calls: The iPhone doesn't recognize phone numbers in the Location field of calendar events at all. It sort of recognizes numbers in the body of a calendar event, and it does even better if they're formatted like this: tel://800-555-1212p9876 (NB - that looks sort of like RFC-2806 format, but it isn't; the RFC doesn't allow '//' after the scheme). For pauses you can write a comma (',') instead of 'p': that isn't RFC-compliant either, but the iPhone dialer appears to translate 'p' to ',' anyway (look at the call log to see). It seems to be impossible to add '#' at the end: the dialer won't accept the number. Apple's docs are here, but seem to be wrong on most of these points (it doesn't mention the extra '//' after the scheme).
• Album shuffle: What happened to the album shuffle feature? This was my favorite iPod feature, and for me the iPhone is largely about replacing two devices with one. Apparently the iPhone has always been missing this feature, so I don't think Apple will add it any time soon. Update: I've dealt with this by releasing AlbumMixer - I hope you like it.
• To-do list: iCal has to-do lists, and they used to sync with my W810i. They don't sync with the iPhone, because... it doesn't have to-do lists built in. You can download a third-party app, but that seems silly and it's not clear that iCal sync would work. For the moment I'm using Notes instead: create a new note in Mail.app, and it syncs to the iPhone's Notes application. That works reasonably well, but hopefully OS X 10.6 and the next rev of iPhone OS will improve this situation.

I'm sure I'll discover more as I work with the device, and maybe I'll find some solutions too. Watch this space.