In my last post I introduced you to my little experiment of replacing my beloved iPhone 3GS with a HTC Tattoo running the Android operating system.
Now I’d just like to touch some of the things that “switchers”, with a Mac, might come accross, especially when switching from an iPhone to an Android based phone.
Basically there’s just two things I worry about: MobileMe synchronization (Address book, e-mail and iCal) and iTunes sync.
MobileMe: Contacts, Calendar and Mail
Mail is easy. That’s just setting up my MobileMe account with the manual settings that can easily be found with a simple Google search query.
Address Book and iCal synchronization is not as easy. There’s no native solution but I did find SpanningSync which seems to be the best method available, it’s not free though as it comes at a $25 per year price of $65 one time fee.
SpanningSync will sync your Calendar (iCal) and Address Book to Google Calendar and Google Contacts, which you should then be able to sync back down to your Android device. Hopefully. I haven’t tried it yet…
It seems to work okay, though my iCal alerts now comes with two alerts instead of just one, as before. Could be because I’m still syncing my iPhone using MobileMe to my iCal and iCal to Google Calendar so maybe there’s something screwing up. I will disable iPhone sync during my HTC Tattoo week. For now, I set up SpanningSync to only sync to Google, and not back from Google.
There’s a 15 day trial for SpanningSync so I’m able to use it for my iPhone Free Week experiment without buying a license. Great!
iTunes & Android Sync
I found two applications that should be able to help out here:
Salling Media Sync comes in two versions. A basic version that is free to use and a paid version that enables faster sync but comes with a price of $22.
HTC Tattoo is not on the Salling Media Sync compatible devices list, but HTC Hero and Magic is, so hopefully it will work with Tattoo as well. Seems the device will have to be in “USB storage” mode, to work.
The Missing Sync from Mark/Space is in a pre-release beta version and curently free. HTC Tattoo doesn’t show in the list there either, but I don’t expect it to be a problem. The Missing Sync seems to be more advanced and offer more options than Salling Media Sync, but my previous experiences with The Missing Sync from Windows Mobile a few years ago, was not so good. I’m probably going to try out Salling Media Sync first and if that works as easy as I hope it will, then I’m sticking with that.
Android can’t play your iTunes DRM protected content, so none of the above applications is going to help you there.
Till Next Time…
I expect to get my hands on the HTC Tattoo later today, but I might not have time to play with it until Monday. Either way, I will try to post my initial thoughts during Monday – so subscribe and don’t miss a thing 🙂
As an iPhone user it will be interesting to see the outcome of this, look forward to the update
Me too 🙂
I received the phone, so will start using it tomorrow.
I have an HTC Tattoo which my husband purchased in Hong Kong recently. Are you using Optus as your carrier?