Today’s smartphones are super clever- they can navigate, socially network, manage your life, let you enjoy music and movies and even occasionally be used for speaking to people. These devices do so much and this is often the main reason for people to buy them in the first place, but getting media onto the devices is often a fragmented process which requires far too much time to complete.
As much as I do not like some aspects of iTunes (the backup process for one), it has a killer feature in that it can manage all types of media and directly pass them to the iPhone with little or no hassle. Moving media purchased outside of iTunes is also incredibly easy to manage and this adds even more benefit. With some video conversion tools you are all set to move your entire media library over to iTunes and then consequently to the iPhone itself.
I can think of no other mobile platform that manages to create a seamless experience for managing media between a computer and a smartphone; the BlackBerry and Symbian solutions attempt to bring media and PIM data to the smartphone, but the media sides are not good, and in the case of BlackBerry it is shockingly bad. Android suffers from being designed to do most things over the air and Windows Mobile is another system which has never got things right when it comes to managing media on the phone.
Some say that apps are not important in defining the success of a phone, and in some ways I agree, but making the user experience as painless as possible when adding various file formats to a smartphone is very important in building customer loyalty. It is hard to pinpoint, but when a system works as well as iTunes it almost feels like an extension of the phone itself. My iPhone is nothing without iTunes and for once I can understand the locked down nature that Apple has employed. For all of the money spent developing Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and the rest no one seems to have caught on to the fact that development is needed outside of the phone itself to create a positive customer experience.
In it’s day palm desktop was similarly a very good system. It didn’t do media of course but using it was integral to the success of palm.
The question is do we want a tool to do work, or an entertainment device? The two have still not merged.
@ teejay69 – I’m not sure that’s true. I sync my iPhone at work for all my contacts, appointments and tasks AND then sync it at home for the apps and music.
It does this seamlessly, with no errors and with an elegance that my old WM phones could only dream of!
My iPhone has revolutionised my opinion of smartphones. It is simply so easy for me to get everything I need out of it. Of course there are imperfections… I absolutely hate it backing things up every 5 minutes or so. But (IMO) it’s head and shoulders above anything else I’ve used.
I still miss Palm Desktop’s openness to third-party conduits. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked down two flights of stairs in my office only to realize that I had forgotten to sync OmniFocus and DocsToGo.