Max 9 pages, thus Max 144 Apps on iPhone OS 2.0

I use an iPod Touch for development, so I decided to load every free iPhone App I could find, plus the few that I've paid for on it just for testing. After doing so, and trying to organize my apps, I made some interesting discoveries:

• There is a max of 9 pages that you can move your home page icons to, despite there being a lot more room for "dots" at the bottom of the screen. With 16 icons per page, this means a max of 144 apps can be installed functionally on your iPhone. With just the free apps so far, I've got over 100.
• The actually number is lower, because every time you move an icon from one screen to another an icon slips off the end to the next page. If there is no next page, it disappears, only to reappear if you do a hard reset. Thus you have to leave one icon "slot" open for each page to move around.
• It is a pain to organize lots of icons around by moving them from page to page. Also, sometimes they just disappear. Not deleted as by accidently clicking the close box, but disappear. They will only show up after the next time you do a hard reboot.
• It takes iTunes a lot longer to sync applications then it does other data, so my syncs are backups are taking a lot longer. Worse, when iTunes decides to not only sync but also backup my iPhone, it can take over an hour.
• So far I've got my pages organized as follows:
  1. Quick access essentials like SMS, Contacts, Notes, and OmniFocus
  2. My most used apps like Twitteriffic, and most of my web icon bookmarks, such as gmail's great web app and TypePad's Blog It.
  3. My camera, photo, and camera related apps like Exposure, Comic Touch, NearPics, etc.
  4. Location based apps, like Yelp, Where, Whurl, etc.
  5. My music apps, like the iTunes Store, YouTube, Pandora, Truveo, Remove, plus media related apps like Movies.app.
  6. My games, like Monkey Ball, and weird stuff like Phone Saber and Rotary Dialer
  7. Various search related apps, like pocketpedia, google app, etc.
  8. Weird stuff that just doesn't fit anywhere else, like eBay
  9. And Page Nine, where I put rejects before I delete them, and undeletable apps that I don't use like Weather (WeatherBug is better).

This problem should be an opportunity for third party apps, however, Erica Sadun's organizer app was not approved by Apple when many other of her apps were approved. Clearly Apple is going to need to address the problem of iPhone App organization and limits on number of iPhone Apps in a future update.

Comments

[Jean-Jacques GOLAY]

Hi,
I am facing the same problem where after having downloaded quite a few free apps plus fee ones, I am close to the 144 limit.
How can I be informed of any new development allowing to go beyond this 144 limit?
Thanks for your help

[Nink]

just hit this problem bummer lucky i got the 16 gig ran out of apps supported at <2 Gig

[jailbreaker]

jailbreak your phone and install categories. it will allow you to organize apps in folders