iHoot: Our iPhones expose a Camera Roll bug

Inexplicably, three of my friends and I ended up at the Fisherman's Wharf Hooters in San Francisco last week after we got our iPhones.

We actually went there for the food--no, really. We wanted buffalo wings, and where else to go but Hooters? Anyway, the usual siren-like charm of the waitresses went unnoticed by us. From my understanding of how it works at Hooters, usually the customers fawn over the waitresses, who are the objects of desire. Well, this day it was the complete opposite, since the ogled became the oglers as soon as we whipped out our objects of desire--erm, our iPhones.

After their giggling and squealing, the girls insisted we take pictures of them using our iPhones. Being the nice guys we are, we obliged. I've posted some of those pictures here so you can judge the quality of the 2.0 megapixel camera. As we took them, I swore I could see looks of envy of the other iPhone-less guys at Hooters, but I may have been imagining it. (I suppose if one is so inclined, the iPhone is a great mack-daddy device: get their phone number, picture, email, take notes about them, wow them with useless trivia as accessed via the Internet?)

Telling my other friends the Hooters story required the use of the iPhone's Camera Roll feature. And this is where I have found my first consistent iPhone-crashing bug that requires a full reset. The Camera Roll feature is pretty dang cool. Most of the time the feature allows you to flick and flip through pictures with impunity, all the while only using your fingers. You can resize, rotate or drag. You can email, add to contacts and just generally be paparazzi-like. That said, there are pictures--in this case the ones of the Hooters waitresses--that when accessed will literally stop the iPhone in its tracks. After I get to the Hooters girl picture it's no longer possible to move forward, zoom or, well, do anything. Pressing the "home" key does nothing. The girls are just there on screen, staring and smiling at you. (One time, however, the screen went blank, only to be replaced with white and yellow stripes. I'm not sure which is worse).

I soon discovered the only solution was to do an iPod "reset" function, as adapted for the iPhone. This consists of holding the "home" key and the upper right switch down at the same time for 8 full seconds. It was the 8 seconds that got me at first--I thought it was 5.

This got me thinking: These girls sure are pretty and could conceivably stop traffic in its tracks, but it's another thing for them to stop the iPhone in its tracks.