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The grande finale…

The next beef with iTunes is the syncing.

I’ve been using a Zune for the past few years so that’s what I’m comparing the syncing to.  The Zune software monitors folders that you specify.  Since most music / videos download into subfolders in the My Music or My Videos folders (the subfolders represents the store you bought the content from) you can simply tell Zune to monitor the My Music / Video / Pictures folders and it’ll catch everything regardless if you buy it from iTunes, Zune, Amazon, etc.  Zune sees new content immediately, loads into the Zune software and (assuming the hardware is plugged in) syncs it to the player.  The entire process to buy a song and get it onto the player takes about 10 seconds, depending on download speed and 1 click.  Songs you buy on the Zune player itself are also transferred back to the PC when synced.

That’s Zune… which has existed for only a few years and has single digit market share.

The iPhone / iPod syncing process is another aspect of iTunes that is painfully outdated.  When you buy content its downloaded to the computer.  You then need to tell iTunes to sync. Its annoying but where it breaks down completely is for podcasts and apps.

Apps cant run on the computer so they need to be on the phone to test them which means you need to sync every time you download a new app.  If you don’t like the app, you can delete it directly from the phones interface but that doesn’t remove it from iTunes even by syncing.  So if you frequently clean out apps on the iPhone itself… you’ll be left with a ton of zombie apps in iTunes that aren’t being used for anything.

Podcasts are another nightmare due to the size of the files (specifically video podcasts).  If you’re unable to continually sync, as iTunes stays open and refreshes podcasts they begin to queue up and can create a lot of data to sync at once. Especially if you’re opening iTunes fresh and it hasn’t been able to keep the podcasts updated it will download all of the updates, which takes time and when they’re downloaded you’ll need to manually sync, which takes more time.  Granted an auto-sync feature wont reduce download time but if the podcasts are moved to the iPod / iPhone immediately after download that cuts the process time significantly.

To Summarize

The iPhone is damn near perfect and the apps are the icing (or are THEY the cake and the iPhone is the icing… hmmm). I don’t think the phone itself revolutionized smartphones as Apple simply pulled together existing ideas, polished them up and made them sexy and unless you live in a cave you know that Apples Marketing Machine is one of the best in the industry (see: Reality Distortion Field or iSheep).

iTunes however hasn’t kept up. Apple simply doesn’t put the emphasis on iTunes the way it does on the hardware that works with it and as the hardware advances the gap only grows bigger and much more painful.

Rumors have been circulating lately that Apple requested developers to begin submitting keywords for their apps and that iTunes 9 will have the App Store completely overhauled and I’m definitely hoping for it. Until then there are plenty of websites that allow browsing.