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Comment by trustfundbaby | Hacker News Reader

syncing is a massive PITA, thats why.

I just bought this new album and am halfway out the door ... but oh wait!!! I forgot to sync it to my iphone, and I really want to listen to it on my 30 minute drive to work ... now I have to go back in the house, hope that my iphone shows up in itunes when I connect it (on windows sometimes you have to restart your computer for this to happen) then select the album and hit 'sync' which takes another couple of minutes.

oh joy.

Then have you ever gotten your phone/ipad played with it, installed a few apps, downloaded some books before finally connecting it with itunes, only for Apple to tell you that its about to to wipe out all the apps on your phone since its a new device and you downloaded all those apps before your first sync?

Yeah ... lets just say the number doesn't surprise me.

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After using Google Music on my Android, and the rest of Android's excellent syncing capabilities, I don't think I could ever use an iPhone in its current state simply because syncing with iTunes is an absolute burden.

To elaborate, I heard a really cool song at my friends house the other day and wanted to listen to it on the road home (long trip). So I start up LogMeIn on my Nexus S, remote into my pc and quickly download the album. Once the album finished downloading, Google Music picked it up and started to upload it to its own service. In less than 5 minutes, and over 250 miles away from my home PC, I had this particular album on my phone ready to be played on my car stereo. That to me is absolutely incredible, and I think it really highlights where Apple is starting to fumble with the iPhone in comparison to some of Android's features.

Ease of use? You forgot the part where you had to remote desktop into your home PC to download the music. iPhone users have had a functional music store on their phone since 2007.

Amazon MP3.

It was a bad example. Amazon MP3 Store downloads straight to the phone.

What's a good example, then? iOS devices can directly download music, apps, videos and books. There are few reasons it ever needs to be tethered, backing up being one of the big ones.

This isn't to knock Android's current OTA syncing, nor to say I'm not looking forward to iCloud. It's merely to point out that today's iOS isn't really that far behind Android as far as the customer experience goes. The only area where I see Android's experience as being superior is the case of a customer buying an app on their computer and sending it directly to their Android device.

The reason why Apple Store Geniuses are so excited for OTA iCloud syncing is mostly for the OTA backups – if every iOS customer is automagically backed up to iCloud, they can do a device swap without taking the time to backup and restore in-store.

Not where I normally live. Of course, neither does Amazon.

They have wifi sync come this fall.

I have never met a person that enjoyed syncing, independent of the device they used. I’m also not at all surprised.

iPhones are perfectly functional phones without any syncing. If you don’t want to listen to your music or if you are content with only buying music in the Store there really is no need to sync. I guess the other big ticket item are photos but I have met very few people that keep their photo collection on their phone. The camera roll is all they need. (Also: A single sync is enough to bring both photos and music to the device, no need for additional syncs in the future.)

Contacts, emails, notes, calendar and all that stuff already work wirelessly, for example with a Google account.

This is how people used to use phones, why should that change with the iPhone?

All this once again demonstrates is that something like iCloud is long overdue to make all those rare use cases easier where sync would be nice if it weren’t so hard to use.

Another reason why people might not sync their photos might be that there is no iPhone with more than 32GB of storage.

The next time I sync my phone it'll be for iOS5/iCloud. The sad thing is the current syncing experience is improved quite a bit from what it used to be.

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