Our mobile devices not only need to be portable, but they also need to be synchronized with our inbox, calendars, and other computing devices. In this video, you’ll learn about these data types and the synchronization options and connectivity needed for Android and iOS devices.
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Our mobile devices are storing so many different kinds of information inside of them. We might have something like contacts which keeps a list of everybody we happen to know. This is not only useful for personal use but obviously for business use as well.
Our mobile devices are also running applications and programs for us. If we lose our device we will certainly need to recover those applications later on. I’m doing a lot of email on my device, you probably are as well. And so all of our emails are stored on these mobile devices. And of course we keep things like videos and pictures, and media on our mobile devices. And we want to be sure there were able to synchronize all of these mobile devices with a third party device.
We’re usually synchronizing our mobile devices with our desktop computers. So we want to be sure that if we add a contact on our mobile device, that contact will be updated on our desktop. And if we update on our desktop, that change will also be seen on our mobile device. With iOS, we use iTunes from Apple to be able to perform this synchronization. It synchronizes everything that’s in our phone.
So all of the things that we’re adding, like music, and pictures, and applications, will all be synchronized and backed up to this iOS that’s on our desktop. This backup is done automatically when we synchronize. We don’t even have to think about it during the synchronization process, so it’s very easy to have all of our data backed up. That means if we lose our phone we can buy a new one, plug it in to our iTunes desktop and it will take the backup and restore it onto our new device.
Android devices don’t quite have the same comprehensive synchronization functions available. But there is a lot of synchronization that is done online to Google. We know that the Android operating system was built with synchronizing online to Google in mind. So it can avoid a lot of the things that we see when we’re using iTunes, everything simply happens over the network to Google’s online servers. But if you like to have that local synchronization, there are some third party tools available. Things like doubleTwist can take that synchronization on your Android and make it look and feel like the synchronization that we might do on an iOS device.
There are a number of different connection options we have available to perform this synchronization on our mobile devices. On iOS we would use USB on our desktop computers, but the connection into our iOS device is proprietary. Older iOS devices use this Apple 30 pin connection and newer devices use this 8 pin connection that Apple calls a Lightning connection.
You can also, of course, synchronize over your 802.11 wireless network that you might have in your home and office. And of course, a number of synchronizations can be done across your mobile cellular network as well. Android device connectivity doesn’t use these proprietary connectors, it instead uses a very open and well used connection called USB Micro-B.
You’ll notice that this will work on your Android phones. You probably also have a number of devices that also use exactly that same type of connection. And of course, you can use your 802.11 wireless and your mobile provider network as well, to provide that synchronization up to the Google servers.