Amazingly, the USB charging lead is even shorter than the already-too-short iPhone one.
Welcome to your first experience with an Android phone, not being able to use it because there is no charge in the battery and you literally can’t switch it on.
So, in theory, when my Android phone arrives, I should just need to put in my Google account details and, as if by magic, my contacts, calendars etc should all just appear via my Google account.
Except I don’t use Google for contacts and calendars.
I use iCloud (of course). To date, this has performed pretty much flawlessly for me. I add a contact on my iMac, it’s in my phone. I change a phone number on my iPad, my MacBook Air knows about it. I can share calendars with my wife that we can both edit so we know what each other is up to and that’s pretty killer. But Apple wants to be the only provider of your nice sync data.
I’ve spent two days now looking for workarounds, hacks and dedicated software to deal with this issue, and it seems to be pretty fruitless. The closest I got was with SyncMate, but it simply refused to sync contacts up to Google, but did manage to duplicate them on my Mac. Of course, these duplicates weren’t be going into iCloud anyway, which at least made them easy to delete.
In the end, I exported a vCard archive from OS X Address Book and imported this into Google. Apparently though, Google isn’t smart enough to deal with all the fields, so some contacts that exist purely as Facebook or Twitter contacts, simply have no information other than a name. (Yes, I verified the information was actually in the export). Black mark against Google there. If I can’t trust it to keep the information I’ve entered then what else will it manage to lose?
So, basically, I see no way to have iCloud, which I consider vital for every device I own, to work alongside Google services or hardware. I’d be very happy to hear from anyone who has got this to work reliably.
It is no secret that I’m a complete Apple fan. I use Macs, iPad, iPhone and AppleTV daily. I run music though iTunes Match and use iCloud for calendar and contacts syncing. However, I am also a web developer and decided that an Android handset would be important for testing sites on and, to be honest, I was interested in seeing how the competition was stacking up.
With that in mind, I ordered up one of the current cream of the crop, the HTC One X (tried both it and the Samsung Galaxy SIII, preferred the HTC). It should be arriving tomorrow and I’m going to document my experience of living with it.
I do not intend to ditch my iPhone, I will mostly be running this side by side. Not sure yet how that will work out without a SIM in the HTC, but I rarely make calls and data is typically when I’m within wifi range. I can always turn on hotspot on the iPhone. I will probably spend a couple of days trying to use it as my main phone.
Wherever possible, I am going to be unbiased when I talk about it, but it will be heavily slanted towards Apple users who are interested in what “the other team” is doing.
