When I tried Skype, which I had before now I realize, it doesn’t seem to just dial and pick up. It fails. Can it call any number free of charge or is there a catch?
Specifically, it just says “Dialing…call ended” and stops.
I only played with it a few times before I started using FaceTime but I seem to remember just entering a phone number and hitting send. Worked a charm.
I just updated it and now it says I need Skype credit. I guess I meant for free, not for pay. 
Do you have to use iTunes with the iPhone, or can I just drag/drop my mp3 and .avi files to it like most players? Can I buy things without going through iTunes? I remember having that software on my desktop about 6 years ago and it brought the thing to a standstill until I uninstalled, would really like to not have to do that again if possible. I note post 2 touches on this a bit, but not sure if it’s the only option, or if there is some sort of work-around.
There are third-party tools that people have mentioned here a few times. Mostly in the context of managing music. I don’t know how well they’d do with all the other stuff the phone uses, however.
Personally we just use iTunes since, generally, it works right “out of the box”. Of course we don’t typically have it loaded unless we’re doing something with the handhelds.
You pretty much have to use iTunes. You can drag and drop to your device in iTunes I believe, but the iPhone will never act like a flash drive where you can just freely move files to and from it. Sucks but it’s not too bad.
I have more music than will fit on my iPod so I have iTunes only sync selected songs, that works well.
**Evernote. ** It’s been life-changing for me. Every important piece of paper gets scanned or photographed and dumped into Evernote with OCR and tags for later searching. Important emails, web clippings, notes to myself, whatever. It all goes into Evernote.
Most of the third party programs do require that iTunes is installed on your computer and that iTunes recognizes your iPhone or iPod, as they depend on files that iTunes installs on your computer. So you will need to install iTunes anyway. Once you do that, though, you can use whatever third party app you have without needing to open iTunes.
I use CopyTransManager. It’s compatible with all iPhone models, including the 4S, and is compatible with iOS 5. And it’s free.