Very unhappy

We received this camera as a gift, and it seemed a wonderful replacement to our poor, broken Photosmart camera. Unfortunately, the problems with this camera aren't immeadiately apparent. The problems are deep seated form-factor and software issues that become constant annoyances farther down the road.

Problems:
1) Buttons are awkwardly located, making it easy to accidentally press the wrong button.
2) Power options for extending battery life are non-existent - the camera simply runs until it dies (without much advance notice).
3) On-camera menus are not intuitive.
4) Movies are in the quicktime format - nothing plays quicktime except intrusive Apple software.
5) Pictures are NOT auto-rotated in windows. You have to use panasonic's "special" software, or otherwise rotate all pictures by hand.
6) Tech support is snotty and unhelpful.

The first problem we noticed with the camera was the awkward positioning of buttons and dials. Both of us are always pressing the wrong button by accident when trying to take a picture. With the menu and navigation buttons right next to where you place your thumb, it is easy to accidentally enable some random feature that we wouldn't otherwise ever use. For me, this problem is especially apparent when taking vertical pictures.

The second problem is the lack of power save options. When travelling, a power plug is not always available, so it is convenient to turn off power hungry features such as the display when you don't need them. Although the battery does last a long time, and the power problem could be rectified by plugging the camera in every night, it is easy to forget. With our previous camera, we could disable the screen when we had forgotten to plug in the camera so we could still take pictures all day on low power. This camera, however, doesn't have that option. Furthermore, it doesn't alert somebody to its lack of power until it has maybe 10 minutes remaining... and then off it goes (at noon on the most picturesque day of the trip).

The third problem is a minor annoyance. We are always struggling to find the right options in the menu. Maybe the features are there, or maybe they aren't... but the menus are crazy.

The fourth problem has to do with Panasonic's use of the Quicktime movie format. We really wanted a new camera so that we could take movies of our 1-year daughter. Unfortunately, all of the cute movies we've recorded are only viewable in Apple's Quicktime. They aren't convertable to any other viewer either. I don't know about other people's experience with Quicktime, but it either crashes my computer outright or hogs processing and network time, preventing other software from running. The result is that we can't watch all of these cute movies we've recorded.

The fifth problem is the auto-rotate feature. The camera has an auto-rotate, right? It is advertised as having one.... too bad they don't use it to rotate the pictures. Instead, they set some software bit in each image that is only readable by the panasonic software. If I want to show pictures to a friend, I have to either rotate everything by hand in windows beforehand, or try to navigate panasonic's clunky, poorly designed software.

Finally, the last problem is with the panasonic tech support. I've contacted them three times, and only received an answer once. And that one time (in reference to the Quicktime problems), they simply told me tough... rather than trying to help me work around the issue, or giving me any contact info from apple or...