I've been experimenting with AOL Radio, Last.fm, and voice recording apps to get a better sense of the iPhone's ability to be a general purpose audio device. In the course of regular use over the past three weeks, I'm really surprised at some of the user interface inconsistencies that appear when another audio app is running.

I fundamentally object to the notion that the hang up button on the headset should launch the iPod application when another audio app is running. I've had this happen to me many times when I was trying to pause the audio app running in the foreground.

What makes this problem even more upsetting is that the iPod app always plays the first track in alphabetical order in my Songs list. That is a song called ABC-DEF-GHI sung by Big Bird, the character from Sesame Street. It's on my iPhone for when my son Jimmy needs something to entertain him.

This problem has existed in every firmware release since the App Store debuted, including Firmware 2.0.2.

Another thing that's beyond me at the moment is why audio apps sometimes stop streaming when the iPhone goes to sleep. Shouldn't the firmware and the API be smart enough to more gracefully handle this?

Let me address a different class of audio apps for a moment. There are now several different applications that allow me to use my iPhone or iPod Touch as an audio recorder. Examples include Audio Recorder and Speakeasy Voice Recorder. I would like to use one of apps to record interviews for a podcast that I'm developing. The problem is that the developers of recording apps have been frustrated by a lack of API support for moving the audio captured on the iPhone to a PC or Mac.

This seems like a no-brainer to me, and it ought to be easy to restrict apps to moving the files were created by them. Is it too much to ask to have a simple "mailto" function?

I'm learning to live with the idea that no third-party apps can have tasks that run in the background, so I'm not asking for these third-party audio apps to function on par with the iPod application. But I think Apple could do a better job of providing firmware support for the third-party audio apps that they have already allowed into the iTunes App Store.