Argh! The other day, I mentioned that my iPhone's On-the-Go playlist feature wasn't working. When I add podcasts to my On-the-Go playlist then start playing the first item, the first item plays, but then one of two things happens: It plays the first track again, or it plays a random track. If I select other items from the playlist, they immediately skip to a random track. This is not related to "shuffle" play and cannot be mistaken for a feature: It clearly says it's going to play one track, then the display jumps and starts playing another track. It's a bug.

This problem seems to be limited to podcasts: OtG playlists seem to work for music.

This seems to be limited to my iPhone. OtG playlists work with podcasts on at least one other person's phone (sync'd to their own iTunes library), and I haven't found mentions of this problem on the web.

I did a full restore through iTunes. No change.

I suspected that the problem might not be with the iPhone, but with the indexes iTunes generated for the iPhone. So I moved my music and podcast files to another hard drive, obliterated my iTunes library and index files, opened iTunes to create an empty library, sync'd the iPhone to clear its memory and indexes, then manually copied the music and podcast files back to iTunes and sync'd again. No change.

I'm deeply skeptical that getting a replacement phone will fix the problem, but at this point the only other thing I have to try is to sync a clean phone with my iTunes and see if the problem persists. I guess I'll have to drag my computer and iPhone down to the Apple store and give this a go.

If anyone else has seen this problem, or if anyone has any other ideas, please let me know.