Not sure that title says what is should, but I have been ultra frustrated with one piece to my iPhone world — the small amount of storage. I am used to having a solid 80 GB of space to take my media with me wherever I go, but since the iPhone landed in my hand I am having to learn how to manage a mere 8 GB. I know that still sounds like a lot — if you are like me, you recall computing in the days of 128K of RAM, 400K floppies, and when you did have a hard drive it was 5 MB. So 8 GB should be enough … and it is when I am just running around town. I keep a handful of playlists, three podcasts (with the three most recent), and really only a movie I have been trying to watch. But when I hit the road, I like to have enough media to keep me occupied during flights … that becomes very challenging especially if what I am after are several episodes of a TV show — in my case the Sopranos.

What is so frustrating is how hard it is to regulate what shows up on the iPhone — I have had the same problem with my Apple TV. I finally figured out how to get the 5 most recent episodes on my iPhone in the right order — what was happening is that I would get the 5 episodes at the end of the season … in other words, instead of episodes 1-5 I would get 6-11. It was driving me crazy. The following solution is the only way I have been able to reliably get what I want.

I start by heading to the Info tab of the iPhone when it is connected to iTunes. I check the “only sync checked music and video” checkbox.

Next I head over to my video area of iTunes and locate my show … I uncheck the episodes I do not want to see synced to my iPhone.

I then have to go back into the iPhone area of iTunes and set the pull down to only grab the 5 most recently unwatched episodes.

May not seem like all that much, but it sure took me ages to figure it out. Sorry if this seems obvious … one thing that I should mention is that Apple has the best UI people in the World, they should refine this feature in iTunes.