And +1 on refreshing podcasts. I had hoped they would give this an overhaul in line with what Sten suggests, but I’m prepared to be dissapointed.

Right now, with the iPod click wheel, you can scrub through audio without having to look at the device. You know that one swirl gesture around the click wheel is about a minute forward or back. It works great. But with this idea with the iPhone, you’re going to have to still look at the screen, touch the right spot, hold for the right amount of time and then gesture.

And it doesn’t make sense that finely tuned scrubbing would only be available for podcasts. It would be great if it worked for all formats, especially movies, so you could more easily go back 30 seconds to re-hear the line of dialogue you missed.

It would make more sense if you could scrub via gesture: Enter the scrub mode and swipe your fingers across the screen to move forward in 30-second increments, etc. Or it would make even greater sense if Apple had an in-line remote on its earbuds that contained a click wheel, so you could have iPod functionality for the media player on the iPhone.

Or, one last idea, a major hardware change to the iPhone: Make the whole glass face of the iPhone clickable, like it’s a big button, similar to the MacBook trackpad. When you’re in iPod mode and you want to scrub forward or backward through media, you click the face, which like clicking the center wheel of the iPod, brings up the scrub bar. Use a circular gesture forward or backward, much like you’d use on a scroll wheel iPod, to scrub through audio or video. It would work more like the iPod and you could scrub without having to look at the iPhone.

The way it should work is: you subscribe to podcasts, and the phone checks for updates in the background. A badge on the app icon alerts you when there are new episodes available. No excursions to iTunes needed. And of course it ought to be possible to subscribe to podcasts not listed in iTunes.