Do You Sync or Sink?

I think i figured it out. When confronted with the choice between Android and the Verizon iPhone, it is all about sync. When I first played with a smart phone it was not my own. My boss asked me to help sync his contacts on his Palm Treo, and we had quite the adventure getting things to work properly. Making Groupwise, Gmail, Outlook, and Palm all play in the same playground was not an easy task and I spent hours reading technical manuals, forums, and blogs to try and teach myself the skills only a trained IT professional should have been able to master. An IT guy I am not, but I pretend to be because my services are usually free and you get what you pay for. When I got my first smart phone it was a Blackberry. Because my employer had an enterprise server, synchronized contacts, mail & calendars was to be expected. What made me a Google fan was when they introduced Google Sync for smartphones. Simply installing an app, put all my contacts, and appointments in my pocket. When I added anything to my phone, like magic, Google had it in the cloud for me to edit and improve upon at my desktop and without relying on the corporate server. When I resigned and they remote wiped my phone, it was only a matter of minutes that I had re-installed Google Sync and my address book was back in business.

Because Blackberry was, and still is no multi-media powerhouse, when the iPhone was released I was blown away. Because my employer provided my phone and Verizon service, it was not an option for my daily phone so I immediately sprung for the iPod touch. You can read my many posts on the iPod touch and know I am a big fan, and again Google Sync can get your contacts all mirrored onto you iPhone or touch just as swiftly.

Now here's the rub. What about the best aspects of the iPhone: media? Google doesn't sync your music, your photos, or your video. By design you must use iTunes on the iPhone and that kills it for me. Yes there are alternatives, yes you can jailbreak and sure, if your already an iPod owner your accustom to iTunes so you may not mind. The reality without going rogue is if you just want to add an album, a photo album, or a video to your iPhone it requires iTunes to sync it over. Again, I am not an iPhone expert but I have attempted to assist many times in this assuming simple task, only for it to lead to frustration and often surrender. Just kill me if iTunes is due for an update. Why every update is 90+MB is a mystery to all.

While adding media to my Droid is not flawless, mounting it as a mass storage USB device and just dragging what I want over makes perfect sense. I have even rooted my Droid and done this over WiFi although slow, it was possible and begs the question, Apple, Why Not?

While I typically rant, here I ask for your council. Have you come up with a way to sync your media to your mobile device? Do you stream it, or do you sync it?

The technology front is evolving so fast, new phones, data services, and tablets are all being dumped into the market faster than the average consumer can digest them. My passion is reading sites like Engadget, and CNET, and yet even I can't decide what is going to replace my original Droid . Although it is less than a year old it already feels like a antique. But this just might be what they want. I get this sinking suspicion while I want to be syncing, I'm actually being sunk.

For now I'm sticking with my Droid, but convince me otherwise, the Verizon iPhone is very tempting and my birthday is just around the corner.