CleanMPG Reviews the HTC Thunderbolt 4G on the Verizon Network

A review of sorts… but of a Smartphone?

And that's just the thing! Droid may not need iApps, but *I* do. ALL my music is on iTunes, and it syncs effortlessly. When I add songs or movies, change playlists, download new podcast episodes -- often dozens of changes at the same time -- my iPhone automatically syncs everything automatically and beautifully. Just like an iPod.

Not trying to bash on the Droid; if anything, I'd be interested in the lower price and breaking free of Apple's domination, but near as I can tell this is still an area where it lags. PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong, because I'll probably be in the market for a new phone later this year. I might consider something else if the iPhone weren't so dang awesome, including as a music player. From what I can understand, to sync a Droid I'd have to manually identify the affected files, drag them to the device folders (subfolder by subfolder!!), and manually delete the things from the device that are no longer relevant. In other words, the way MP3 players were BEFORE the iPod came along and not many people had them.

From where I sit, the Droid appears to be an excellent smartphone that also happens to have a decent music player but without iPod style sync capability. The iPhone is an iPod that also happens to be an excellent smartphone.

Actually... there's an app for that on Android (https://market.android.com/details?i...=search_result). It also has a wireless add-on so you can do it while not docked .

Personally, the only way apple will ever see a dime from me (and maybe not even then... yay craigslist) is if I go down the mobile app development path. And I'll be drug down the apple tree kicking and screaming.

Thanks for that link! I still have 2 iPods, which I'll continue to use. For one, it makes it easier for me when I travel, etc. not to use my phone and drain the battery even more.

I will say, that overall I'm giving my iPods a 6.5/10 on the scale for 2 main reasons:

1 - Within 2 years of owning my first iPod, the battery died on it and wouldn't last more than a couple hours. Apple, of course, wanted an arm and leg to replace it. I ordered the battery online and completed the task in 30 minutes sitting at my desk at work.

2 - My iPod touch has had to get restored at least two times over the past 3 years, and now it doesn't actually "shuffle" the songs. It doesn't play them in 1, 2, 3, etc order, but it plays the same songs in the same order. I notice this more now that I have less than 200 songs on there.

You should just be able to run WMP and use the Sync feature.

I don't use iTunes... but, does WMP even come close to it? For all it's faults, I really enjoy(ed) my Zune 120 second gen (until the HDD failed... still working up the cash to replace the drive). For 15/mo I get to choose any song from the zune library to load, and I can choose channels that get autocreated for the various music types I listen to. The downside is the Zune HAS to go through that atrocity that is the zune music software on the PC, and finding music in your library when you have a ton of stuff is just... painful.

I don't use WMP enough really to know how well it does any automatic syncing. Microsoft don't make a KDE version.

I just got my first smart phone, not because I necessarily wanted to, but because one becomes forced into it by social and professional expectations.

Long story short: past Verizon customer, former employee, was still getting (after 5 years) a discounted plan and my original contract was fulfilled in 2004. They finally caught on and were raising my plan. Ancient Samsung flip phone.

I could not justify paying upwards of $100 a month for a cell phone. I ended up going with Virgin Mobile. Month to month, no contract, Amex points, etc. $150 at Best Buy Samsung Intercept did not have stellar online ratings, but it does way more than I expected it would do. I have fat finger issues, so a slider keyboard was a must. Like any computer, if you run a bunch of (unnecessary) apps simultaneously, it will run a but slow. Same with battery life: if you have GPS on indoors, and wi-fi on when you're out of range it will use battery life, duh, but the average person is too stupid to read the user guide, so they rant online instead. Also, like any PC, it helps to shut the thing down and reboot once in awhile.

The GPS navigator is surprisingly decent also. I get a cell signal at my office, whereas with Verizon I did not. The flipside is that the signal is not strongest at my house, but its operational. For about $28 a month, I get everything I need. 300 min of talk, which I'll never use, unlimited text, and unlimited data which at some point is theoretically capped, but I can't imagine I'd ever hit the limit.

After 6 weeks, I'm tickled with it. If things go sour, I just just ditch the phone, or sell it on Craigslist, and I don't have to deal with any termination issues. I'm still sorting through and trying out various Android apps, and getting the phone customized to my uses, but all in all this thing way exceeds my expectations.

1. What Ophbalance said.

2. I'm not moving all my music to a new app. Either it syncs with iTunes or it doesn't. Sounds like iSyncr may do this (though it's STILL an extra layer of software), and the reviews look better than the craptacular ones I've heard about the other quasi-sync apps for Droid/iTunes. So I'll look into this further.

3. I'm on a Macbook, not a Windows. Somehow I don't think WMP is even an option.

Ah. It's a whole different story for Windows and Linux users.

To see if it's even remotely usable... I've downloaded iTunes 64bit 10.x, iSyncr + iSyncr WiFi. I'm adding some files to my iTunes library (slooooooooooow.. it's pulling from a network share). It's only a subset of my music as I don't want the stupid thing spinning all day (I've got to crank up Oracle in a bit).

Based on what I'm seeing from a preliminary glance, iSyncr grabs your various playlists from iTunes, as well as movies/etc (the stuff on the left hand nav of iTunes software). From there, you can tell it to sync things up automatically and on what schedule to try this (WiFi version). I think the USB version will just automagically sync when you plug the device in to USB and tell it (the Android device) to mount it's file share to your machine.

Downside? You need to install software on your machine as a service for WiFi and USB sync. It uses a really high non-standard port for WiFi, so I cannot see it intentionally mucking any other service... but it's one more thing that has to be running on your machine. Right now it's sitting there at 12 megs of memory. In comparison, MySQL is at 14 megs. iTunes is all over the map with iPod services, MobileDevice, iFrmewrk, and a few other thrown in, ranging from 2 meg to 75 meg.