There's no sane reason that an iOS couldn't do cloud syncing as reasonably as Android does. To Gruber's points:
> getting your stuff onto your new iPad
Apple will never do it, but Android devices commonly solve this by using an SD card that can be transferred to and from devices. My Nexus One has this hidden behind the battery, so practically speaking I'm not going to be without it. My photos, videos, and music are on there, or Flickr/Amazon/Dropbox. (Or my home computer, which doesn't factor here.)
> updating iOS
My Nexus One updates over the air automatically out of the box, and I have an app called ROM Manager that downloads/installs third-party Android distributions also OTA. Apple's made the conscious decision to ship iOS updates as full downloads rather than deltas, which makes this an issue of distributing nearly-1GB packages. I can update to a new build of my Android distribution in under ten minutes.
> backing up and restoring your iPad
Gruber mentions that stock Android doesn't do out of the box backup and restore, which is wrong. I just today did a factory restore of my phone and, after I set up my Google account, my phone settings were restored, along with all the apps I'd downloaded from the Market. This was done automatically without having to initiate a restore.
Gruber mentions that photos, videos, and music aren't updated, but those are stored (as mentioned) on a device-independent SD card when they're not stored in the cloud in the first place.
Android isn't perfect, but it does have this sewn up. As far as my Nexus One is concerned I don't own a full PC, and it couldn't care less. When I had an iPhone, I remember iOS releases as events where everyone in the office ran back to their laptops to see if they could connect to the download server, and then left their phones tethered for the next hour or two.
> Android devices commonly solve this by using an SD card that can be transferred to and from devices. My Nexus One has this hidden behind the battery, so practically speaking I'm not going to be without it.
How is this any different than plugging in a USB cord to sync? What are you shuttling the SD card between anyway (a PC I assume)? Physical media is not a good answer to "cutting the cord".
> How is this any different than plugging in a USB cord to sync?
It's device independent. You can wipe the device or switch to a new one without waiting for a full sync of your potentially large media library.
"Cutting the cord" doesn't mean pretending you don't have other devices, it means eliminating reliance on them. Presumably if you don't have a PC or another device you don't have any digital media to transfer to your phone in the first place.
I mean, you can store your media on the net and stream it down at will. Or you can store it on an SD card (or whatever) and put that in whatever device you're using today. Having to sync devices to a central master PC is the issue.
I don't understand what your argument is. Let's restate:
iOS requires that you connect your device to your PC in order to activate service, update the OS, and to manage media on the device. This is onerous and unnecessary.
Android doesn't require this. One of the ways, but not the only way, in which this is implemented is in the use of removable SD cards, which can be loaded with media independently of the device the media is consumed on. It is not required that you do any of this to operate the phone.
You never have to connect your Android device to a PC if you choose not to.
If you choose to load your media onto your device via Dropbox or via streaming from Amazon's cloud service (or, apparently, Google's upcoming service), you don't even have to muck with loading an SD card. You may feel free to listen to Pandora and upload your photos to Flickr without ever touching a PC.
So you're saying that physical media is better than a USB cable? Like the poster above, I do not see the practical difference here. In one case, you're transferring an SD card from one device to the other. In the other, you're taking a cable and pluging in the device into a PC and letting it sync. Realistically, the USB method is just slower.
Plus, unless you're switching phones every month, the full-on sync only happens occasionally.
If you want to backup your device, you still need a separate entity(either a cloud service or a PC) anyway. You need to copy the SD card's contents to something else, and that requires a PC for storage. Restoring from a cloud storage service still requires time and bandwidth, so again, practically, that's basically the same as plugging in a device.
> So you're saying that physical media is better than a USB cable?
I'm saying that no reliance on a PC is better than reliance on a PC.
> If you want to backup your device, you still need a separate entity(either a cloud service or a PC) anyway.
When did this become about doing backups? Gruber's article is title "Cutting That Cord" and is about cloud-based syncing and iOS devices, and my original comment was outlining how (most?) Android devices don't rely on a home-base PC, and are architected such that you don't require full backups of your stuff. Big files (media) lives on your SD card, apps and settings live on Google's servers and are downloaded as needed.
If you get a new iPad, you have to plug it into your computer to set it up and sync everything, which is where "backup and restore" comes into play. With a new Android device, you take your old SD card and insert it into the new device and let Google sync your apps and settings. Done.
If you want to do backups of your stuff for archival or safety, that's fine, and that (of course) requires somewhere else to put your stuff. But that's not what I'm discussing.
You're not going to have all your data on that SD card, iOS or Android. I'm betting Android doesn't use that as the main data store or anything like that, just scratch files and data.
What does "main data store" mean? In fact, I don't understand what you're saying at all.
Android backs up and restores apps, app settings and preferences (including 3rd party apps if they opt-in). Files (pictures, video, mp3) stay on the sdcard.
Gruber mentions that photos, videos, and music aren't updated, but those are stored (as mentioned) on a device-independent SD card when they're not stored in the cloud in the first place.
Android isn't perfect, but it does have this sewn up. As far as my Nexus One is concerned I don't own a full PC, and it couldn't care less. When I had an iPhone, I remember iOS releases as events where everyone in the office ran back to their laptops to see if they could connect to the download server, and then left their phones tethered for the next hour or two.