Not too long ago, I wanted to be an Apple fanboy quite badly. I had this little device known as the iPhone, which connected me to the Internet when I wasn’t at home, played music, and reputedly could even make and receive telephone calls.

I loved that iPhone.

And it connected to my computer with a little special cable, where an Apple program called iTunes would synchronize it. iTunes held — and still holds — my entire music collection.

Then things started getting sour.

It began even while I was still in love. Apple wouldn’t let me just turn on my own fucking phone that I had just bought. No. I had to wait until I was home, install iTunes and perform an initial synchronization.

And they wouldn’t let me just install iTunes. They had to try to add their MobileMe service (and later their Safari browser). And not just the first time – they would ask me with every iTunes upgrade that would ever come out.

And they wouldn’t let me put whatever I wanted on my phone. Only specially-approved-by-Apple software could go on a device that I paid hundreds of pounds for.

But I didn’t care. My iPhone was so shiny.

It turned out, however, that these were not glitches in the Apple paradigm; these were instead indicative of Apple’s approach to doing business. And as Apple continued down this road, I decided to stop supporting them with my money. I would cut them out of my life, hardware and software alike. For Steve Jobs & Co., there was no more time, money, or space (real or virtual) in my life.

The iPhone was dutifully ditched for an Android, and this blogger has not looked back. (Well, he has, but he’s had a big grin on his face about the decision.) My other piece of Apple hardware — an external hard drive — was given away.

But there remains one problem: iTunes.

Unbelievably, it remains on my computer — I use a wonderful program called iSyncr to synchronize my iTunes playlists with my Android phone. It works wonderfully, this system of mine. Except that it keeps Apple software on my computer.

And I desperately want to be free of Apple software.

At first I went to DoubleTwist, which is billed in every corner of the Internet as a “must have” Android app, and the Android version of iTunes. It was awful.

Cory Doctorow wrote on BoingBoing about Miro, so I gave that a try. Not only did it lack the functionality I hoped for, but Miro is additionally so full of advertising (and so pushy about its advertising/requests for donation) that AntiVirus software flags it as a virus. It makes Apple’s proprietary formats and DRM look pleasant by comparison.

Frustration was setting in — the both consensus iTunes replacement and Internet Freedom Fighter recommended options did not pull their own weight. So I turned to a dear old friend: WinAMP.

And while we were creeping closer to a proper solution, it still lay just beyond our grasp. WinAMP was by far the best music player used thus far — it worked wonderfully. Yet it still did not synchronize song metadata in the manner that I was hoping for.

Could nothing match iTunes? How is it that a piece of software first designed in 2000 is still the best option for synchronizing music more than ten years later? Surely this shouldn’t happen.

If you are looking for somebody to copy Apple, I thought, look to Microsoft. Windows Media Player was dutifully booted up. It was as bad as I remembered it being, and even refused to recognize my phone as a device to which music could be synchronized.

My last, best hope was MediaMonkey. My research told me that it was the refuge of insane music hoarders, the best tool out there for managing a music collection on your PC. And surely the best music manager in the game must include easy synchronization with the most popular mobile Operating System out there.

Right?

Wrong.

MediaMonkey was breathtakingly efficient at adding all my music, pulling in every rating and playcount from iTunes. It had an answer to everything.

Except a friendly solution to Android synchronization.

It’s strange, because I am not even using iTunes to synchronize anything — I use a third-party tool in order to synchronize over my WiFi connection easily and painlessly. If iSyncr can be built for iTunes, surely it can be built for MediaMonkey.

But in our world full of crowdsourcing, filled with super-intelligent app-writing geeks, the application doesn’t seem to exist.

And I’m still stuck here holding one last rotten, stinking Apple.

Welcome to day two of Android week — with only three days between bank holidays here in the UK and an unusual amount of excitement that accompanies a new gadget, it is looking like we might do an all-Android week here at the Big Bad Blog.

Yesterday, we took a look at our general impressions, and gave a comparison between our new Nexus S and the iPhone. In it, we mentioned that our big surprise was the quality of our music experience. However, getting there was not a smooth ride — today, we give you the full story.

Our goal

Our goal is simple — to replace the iTunes/iPhone functionality with our Google Nexus S.

In particular, we note that our music collection is in excess of 36 gigabytes in size. This is more than twice the storage space available on our phone — and we only want to fill half that storage space with music. This means that we need some method of rotating music in and out.

The method we have used in the past is that of the smart playlist. We have the 4GB of music that has been played least recently, and 4GB of music that we have given high ratings to and has been played least recently.

For this to work, we need to be able to set up similar playlists for synchronization. Ideally, we would also import our existing ratings and playcounts, so we are not starting these playlists from scratch, but we are willing to put up with starting these over from the beginning for the sake of an improved experience.

Stage I: doubleTwist

If you have spent years as an Apple iPod/iPhone customer, you have your music collection on iTunes. And if you are switching to an Android device after all this time, ditching iTunes sounds like a wonderful idea — the only problem is how to do so without losing everything you put into the program. Playlists, ratings, playcounts. If you love music, this is important to you.

Enter doubleTwist.

Every single website that reviews such things has nothing but positive things to say about doubleTwist. It imports your iTunes library, stats, playlists and all. It synchronizes between the PC and Android versions of the software. The most wonderful thing in the world.

I should have known better — there is no way that every single website would agree on such things. Is it lazy reporting, repeating a press release? Is it payola? We have no way of knowing here at the Big Bad Blog.

What we do know is that when we installed it on our PC, it immediately located and imported our entire iTunes library. It nabbed the songs, the stats, the playlists … but left out the “smart” part of the smart playlists. They were no longer auto-updating.

That’s OK, we thought. Let’s sync, and figure out the smart part later.

So we set the phone to synchronize, and walked away.

We never expected an 8GB data transfer to be fast, but it shouldn’t take three hours. Three hours later, and a half dozen photos (and no songs) had moved to the phone.

We cancelled the sync, and uninstalled.

Stage II: Winamp

Having experienced failure from the laziest available approach, we decided to look a bit deeper, and found that Winamp was still around.

Our favourite music player of the late 90s, Winamp still exists, is still updated, and now comes with an Android version. What’s more, the PC and Android versions will synchronize! What could be more perfect?

Unfortunately, a couple of things.

First, the synchronization only happens one way. Playcounts – which are integral to our rotation system – do not synchronize back to the computer from the phone, to update the playlist.

Second, while a “smart playlist” is available in Winamp, it is not called a playlist, and so will not synchronize as part of an “automatic sync”. This means that the sync must be done manually.

Third, the manual sync process is a pain in the butt, having to detect the device, select the songs to be synchronized onto the device, and then synching … which (as mentioned above) does not even cause a proper music rotation.

By this time next year, we fully expect the folks at Winamp will have figured things up, and that our search might have ended here. But in 2011, we needed to perform our second uninstall.

Stage III: iSyncr

At this point, we were despairing. All along, we had really wanted to give MediaMonkey a shot as an iTunes replacement for playlist management and PC-based playback, but the lack of a paired music player gave us pause.

Now, we decided to look at synchronization as its own puzzle. And we found iSyncr.

iSyncr is the first application that we have found in our hunt that works like a dream. The music just copies across, without a hitch. The stats on played music copies back to the PC, without any problem. The only issue is that iSyncr synchronizes iTunes playlists.

iTunes is dead. Long live iTunes.

We can live with this, though — iTunes is now the place our music collection is stored, rather than the one and only door to our phone. We became comfortable with this idea surprisingly quickly. And we have music synchronization.

Stage IV: PowerAMP

Everything was synchronized. We are now listening to music on our new Android phone, … but … there’s still a problem.

It seems that the native application that Google provides to play music is a bit … shitty. The sound quality was notably worse than what I was used to having with my iPhone. This was disappointing. We set to research alternate players.

Most players appear to be alternate front-ends to the same native music player. Some of them were very cool, in fact. And then there’s PowerAMP.

PowerAMP lists the formats it supports on its website, suggesting it uses its own codecs to decode the files, and it has a graphics equalizer. And the sound that comes through my headphones from the Nexus S is superior to that which has come from any MP3 player before it.

And that’s how I found myself leaving Apple, but sticking with iTunes.

I have now had a week to play with my new Google Nexus S phone, and given the attention that was lavished upon the decision, we thought that we would let you know our first impressions.

A few things to keep in mind:

• We are, in general, comparing the Google Nexus S to the iPhone
• Our iPhone was a 3GS. We will try to keep performance in perspective, as the iPhone 4 clearly ought to outperform our old phone.
• We try to remain neutral, but keep in mind that we are not fond of Apple in this corner of the Internet, and are a bit excited about a new toy.

Phone Build

The phone itself is fantastic.

It’s thinner, lighter and has a superior screen to the iPhone 3GS — we’re not sure about the iPhone 4, on any of these counts — and the curved screen makes it feel a bit more like a phone when using it as such. We are not holding a very expensive brick to our face any longer.

And the phone bits? Wonderful. Much better signal strength, much better sound quality.

It’s almost as if it’s a Smartphone built by a phone manufacturer, rather than an iPod with call-making capabilities built by a computer company.

The one advantage the iPhone has, however, is that the Nexus is lacking in heft — we are still left with the distinct impression that the phone will not handle abuse as well as Apple’s did.

Judging phone elements:
Style … Nexus!
Signal … Nexus!
Call Quality … Nexus!
Screen … Tie!
Heft … iPhone!
Accessibility … Nexus!

OVERALL … Nexus!

Music

We knew that Samsung would make a better phone than Apple, though, in terms of pure phone-ness. What about the music?

Music sync and playback is, to us, one of the most important features on the phone, and the biggest cause for concern when switching over — for all the annoyances, iTunes synchronizes with the iPhone pretty smoothly (or it did, once upon a time), and the iPhone is based upon the iPod — a music-playing device.

After some experimentation — the story of which is long enough to fill its own article — we settled on iSyncr and PowerAMP.

iSyncr enables synchronization over WiFi with iTunes. This has been flawless, and makes synchronizing music easier than it ever was with the iPhone. Not only are there no wires required, but changing the synchronization settings are a breeze, once everything has been set up.

The native Android music player is pretty horrendous, however, so we downloaded PowerAMP and found that suddenly our music collection was sounding better than it ever had on the iPhone.

Judging music elements:
Sync … Nexus!
Playback … Nexus!
Initial setup … iPhone!
Modifying setup … Nexus!

OVERALL … Nexus!

Social Networking

Music was an expected weak point for the Nexus, Social Networking an expected strong point. The key to a social network, after all, is to have people participating in it. With Android being the most popular handset Operating System and an open Android market, surely it must be bursting with excellent and innovative apps. While we found success in locating a Twitter client, we were also left with the impression that the iPhone has a greater range of options, application-wise.

We started with Twitter. Our Desktop Twitter client is TweetDeck, and our iPhone client was TweetList, which is not available on Android.

We decided to try TweetDeck for Android, and were pleasantly surprised. We had previously tried their iPhone application and found it lacking. Either they have redesigned their mobile client since then, or have completely separate design teams for the iPhone and Android. The Android Tweetdeck application is excellent — it puts all my networks into a single feed, and allows me to selectively update to Twitter, Facebook and/or FourSquare. (I believe they do LinkedIn as well, if you’re into that sort of thing).

TweetList is a wonderful iPhone application, with the most intuitive interface I have ever used on a Twitter application — or perhaps any mobile application — and is sorely missed for that. But the extra TweetDeck features are fantastic, as we no longer feel the need to have separate Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare applications on our phone.

Judging:
Choice … iPhone!
Functionality … Nexus!
Intuitiveness … iPhone!

OVERALL … iPhone! (by a whisker, so much here is application-dependent).

Other common uses

So there are other common smartphone uses here, which did not seem to group well, and we didn’t want to put elsewhere.

email … iPhone! The native Google application is surprisingly awful. The best option available appears to be K9, which is pretty good, but still does not quite match up to the Mail app that comes with the iPhone.

Maps and Navigation … Nexus! This should come as little surprise, as the iPhone uses Google Maps. Google happens to do Google Maps better. Offline maps and TFL Journeyplanner applications seem on par with the iPhone, though we have had little chance to press them into use thus far.

RSS Reader … Nexus! Back when we were setting up our iPhone, it took us weeks — literally weeks! — and more downloaded apps than I can remember before we settled on Reeder, which met all our reading needs. It took us 24 hours and two downloads to find NewsRob, which does everything Reeder does, but does it smoother, faster and more pleasingly.

Random observations

Beyond the above, we did note a few random things that bear mentioning.

NFC … Tie! A tie? The Nexus HAS Near Field Communication, the iPhone does not. But it hardly matters, because there are absolutely no functions for NFC at the moment, so we just turn it off so that it doesn’t drain the battery at all. Our dreams of swiping our phone to get on the tube, or pay for a coffee, are probably still outside the lifetime of this phone.

Accessibility … Nexus! It’s fairly evident that one of the benefits of Android is access to the device — users can change the battery, access the filesystem, and other such things. This plays out into a larger advantage than a plug-and-player like myself would have thought. Something as simple as showing how much each application has drained the battery is informative and useful, and Android’s policy of indicating what permissions are given to each installed application helps shape our choices more than we anticipated.

Accessories … iPhone! One thing that we didn’t anticipate was the dearth of phone accessories that would be available. Every phone store sells iPhone cases — and then there’s the Apple store. If you have a Nexus, good luck finding a case at the phone store, nevermind a choice of cases. We bought the Tech 21 case, only to find that it wasn’t actually designed with the curved body of the Nexus S in mind — it just had the right height, width, depth and cut-outs. No good. Our most promising option for a case right now is to order one from America. That just seems wrong.

In their pocket … Tie! However, if you are trying to get out under the thumb of Apple — as we were — Google may feel more free, but that’s not necessarily the case. Our phone’s information is backed up on Google’s servers. Our contacts are Google Contacts. Our photos are synched via Picassa, Google’s cloud photo service.

The great advertiser in the sky knows more about us than ever before.

Overall verdict

So, a week into our new Android life, are we happy with the decision we made? Do we still feel that the Nexus S is superior to the iPhone 4?

Yes, and yes.

We find it nicer to look at, nicer to make calls with, and nicer to listen to music and read with. Its in-built functionality is considerably weaker than that on the iPhone, but unlike the iPhone, these functions can be easily upgraded from the market.

And that’s where the real satisfaction comes in. Both systems are easily extensible, through third party applications. But Apple’s insistence that applications are not permitted to compete with the core Apple-built products on the phone means that upgrading is difficult to impossible.

We would choose Android again in a heartbeat.