Originally Posted by
Middle_Seat
(An unrelated caveat: If you have an iPhone full of music and synced to your home computer, and you charge the iPhone from your laptop while on vacation, and your laptop has iTunes installed, and you haven't set the device rules to sync music manually...under those circumstances, the laptop will erase or hide all the music on the iPhone so you won't be able to listen to it on the flight home. Fortunately, when you again sync your iPhone with your home computer, all the music will re-appear.)
actually, all that's needed is to disable automatic syncing when you plug in an ipod/iphone (that is different than manual sync). you can also disable auto-launching itunes entirely, which personally i prefer.
manual sync means everything is done manually, and that's a bit of a pain.